Intel Core i3-7100 vs Intel Core i7-2600

Core i3-7100 vs Core i7-2600 benchmarks

In our benchmarks, the Core i7-2600 beats the Core i3-7100 in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i3-7100 in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core i7-2600 has significantly more cores with 4 cores compared to the Core i3-7100 that has 2 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i3-7100. With our hardware info, we find that the Core i3-7100 has a slightly higher clock speed than the Core i7-2600. A Core i3-7100 CPU outputs less heat than a Core i7-2600 CPU because of its significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Modern CPUs generally have more logical cores than physical cores, this means that each core is split into multiple virtual cores, improving efficiency for parallel workloads. Indeed, the Core i3-7100 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.