If you’re aiming to upsample to DSD512 I’d say you will need to go for something more powerful than an i3, whatever generation. But, one the other hand, the Intels Speed-Stepping and throttling is very well executed in the 8th gen Core processors.
In the first post of this thread you can find some real world examples of processor and hardware performance, however only up to DSD128:
I have added most of these and just to clarify, the tests using my i7 8700 doesn’t seem too impressive by only judging from the figures in the spreadsheet. However, when upsampling to DSD128 the computer was just barely idling and the Speed stepping throttled the clock frequency way down.
(Which can be seen on then power consumption…)