It would, I've thought they go a little extreme with it myself, especially if they want to demonstrate what people building a budget system should expect. Obviously an i7 Extreme is not a budget minded CPU.
Also, the i3 has hyper-threading which makes it a quad-core,
Not for gaming. Games are not coded in programming languages modern enough to know what a HyperThread is, much less how to use one. Also a single HyperThread, so someone told me (I don't know how accurate it is, but it does seem about right) equates to about 30% performance vs having another physical core. (Again this is for non-gaming performance- OS level controlled programs)
And by "lose some FPS", how many? I know that my CPU isn't an i7
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Again, depends on the game, the settings, etc. There are a lot of factors that go into it.. I can mention games that I specifically have experience with.
but I want to know what kind of frame rate drops to expect in games like BF3, Crysis, etc. (FPS), and MMO games like GW2 and WoW. You could sort of break it down into cpu intensive games, and non-cpu intensive games. I guess I'm looking for someone with a little more experience. I appreciate the reply though.
BF3 @ 1080 will have a hard time with an i3. This game is known to give even i5s in multiplayer at high resolution a workout.. I've played Crysis 2, you shouldn't have a problem with that one. MMOs are not that system intensive, GW2 and WoW you won't have an issue with.
LOL, I don't know how much more experience you can get, theres just a lot of factors that goes into gaming performance. Unless someone has an identical system to the one you're proposing, it will still be what I originally said "your mileage may vary".