I'm in the process of returning an i3-9100 based Dell Precision. It's a true 4 core and despite no hyper-threading on the benchmark sites it beats my Haswell Xeon E3 in both multi and single threaded tests. In reality however it's a dog. It gets bogged down for the lightest workloads.

It's also using MORE electricity from the wall, as the old PowerEdge T20 system was an ATX12VO design with a Xeon 1275L.

I'll extend your comment to say that old i7 is universally better than new i3 (and I should have known better).