I'm booked on a Turkish Airlines flight that's scheduled to depart at 9:30pm to Istanbul. I'll be flying into MNL same-day on SQ. I have a choice of arriving at 3:35pm or 5:25pm. These will be separate tickets but I intend to ask SQ to interline our checked bags.

I checked expertflyer and it appears the minimum connection times are between 2-3 hours for SQ and TK connections.

Will this be an air-side transit wholly within Terminal 3?

I'm not crazy about the 3:35 arrival since it's 6 hours before my next flight, so I'd prefer the 5:25pm arrival instead. That said, a missed connection here would be extremely inconvenient.

Thoughts?