I think I had posted here in the past, I do run compute software where ram performance is as important as CPU. As a rough balance, for a Skylake quad core, ideally I'd need the ram to be numerically the same speed as the CPU clock. e.g. quad core Skylake running at 4 GHz, need 4000 MT/s dual channel ram to be "practically unlimited". This also assumes dual rank ram, and there is a stiff performance penalty for single rank, which is particularly annoying as it is rarely specified on ram kits and even 8 GB modules are moving towards single rank these days.
The side effect of the above is, I find the i3 is a great performer. You get two fast cores, and two ram channels to feed it. Nothing can be overclocked nor needs to be, so it can be done very cheaply compared to an OC i5 or i7 setup where you have to consider quality components. Note: this is for a compute scenario where you don't care the cores are in separate boxes or not, you just need a lot of them.
Edit: noticing which forum I wrote this on, I should clarify, I don't consider that the i3 can be usefully overclocked in any meaningful way for this application. The method that breaks AVX would cost you far more in performance than any clock gain, and maybe the Asrock non-Z ram OC could help a little but it would be minor enough that should only be a consideration if it doesn't impact cost to implement.