The Clarkdale Review: Intel's Core i5 661, i3 540 & i3 530
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 4, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
ASUS Saves the Day: Simulated Core i3s
This is the board Intel sent for today's Clarkdale reviews:
It looks cool but it doesn't offer any overclocking features at all. You can't even adjust memory frequency or timings. It's like using a motherboard from ten years ago, just more stable.
The problem is Intel only sent us a Core i5 661 for review. A $196 Core i5 661. And we had no way of underclocking it to simulate a Core i3, the arguably more interesting CPU from today's launch.
I tried some of our P55 boards and had no luck underclocking the chips either. Apparently existing P55 boards need some BIOS help before we'll get that sort of functionality. Thankfully Raja had one of ASUS' boards in house for his upcoming H57 coverage - the P7H57DV-EVO. He confirmed that this board would let me disable turbo mode and decrease the clock multiplier on our i5 661. A FedEx shipment later and we're on track to providing an actually useful review.
ASUS' feature-filled H57 board
Today you'll see results from the Core i5 661 as well as a simulated Core i3 540 and Core i3 530. The GPU clocks are running at the 661's speed for these two simulated chips, but I didn't run any IGP tests with them so it doesn't matter. The uncore clocks are also possibly higher but I'm still waiting for Intel to confirm what the i3 uncore is supposed to be clocked at. In any case, the i3 530/540 results you see here should be close enough to shipping speed. And you can thank ASUS for that.
MSI was also kind enough to send us their H57M-ED65 for use in today's review
The Test
| Motherboard: | ASUS P7H57DV- EVO (Intel H57) Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) Intel DX48BT2 (Intel X48) MSI DKA790GX Platinum (AMD 790GX) Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H (AMD 790GX) Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-UD5P (AMD 790FX) |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1010 (Intel) AMD Catalyst 8.12 |
| Hard Disk: | Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill DDR2-800 2 x 2GB (4-4-4-12) G.Skill DDR2-1066 2 x 2GB (5-5-5-15) Corsair DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Card: | eVGA GeForce GTX 280 ATI Radeon HD 5870 (Windows 7) |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 180.43 (Vista64) NVIDIA ForceWare 178.24 (Vista32) ATI Catalyst 9.12 (Windows 7 x64) |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit (for SYSMark) Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit |
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SydneyBlue120d - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
The Intel G9650 doesn't exist, what You're referring is Intel G6950http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43230">http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43230
puterfx - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - link
I've been building systems since the late 90's, mostly for others, and I'm always the last to get a decent system so I decided it was about time for me. I'm running an e6600 on a 3 yr old Intel board w/ 2g of DDR2 RAM and was wondering about the differences between C 2 quad, i3-540, i5-750 or i7-820. I priced out 3 different setups with Gigabyte boards (EP45, H57 & P55 - USB3 ver.) combined with Q8400/9300/9400 on EP45, i3-540,i5-750 and i7-820 on the H57 & P55 and 4 Gb DDR3 RAM (Crucial, Geil, Kingston)so , basically, I had 9 combinations. Excluding the i7, the price range for these builds was about $429 - $487, and I could probably do better if I tried but I was amazed that they were that close (the i7 adds another $100 but not that much improvement in performance that I can see).Looking at your charts, I think I can justify going with the i5-750. I have a decent video card for the occassional gaming that works pretty good for me now (I'll apply the $100 from above to a better card later) but I do a lot of spreadsheets and some photoshop and autocad so I think I'll see a better improvement there.
Thanks again for all your articles. Very well written, understandable and thorough.
KingAlexander - Saturday, January 30, 2010 - link
I too am puzzled by the i7 870 scoring so low on the World of Warcraft chart -- it stood out to me immediately when I first read the article. I was a little surprised to not see it mentioned.It was suggested in another comment that this was due to the game having an issue with hyperthreading, but if that was the case shouldn't the i7 920 also have scored significantly lower than it did?
Bloodx - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
It should be noted that this new intel system does not workat 1080p/24 correct. The nvidia 9400 chipset works at 1080p/24.
So i've traded audio for skipping.
HTPC is no better off. Sad.
geok1ng - Sunday, January 10, 2010 - link
Previous Intel IGPs managed achieve less terrible numbers in game by cheating- they didn't render all the polygons and textures. So for good measure i require side by side screenshots of the "new, better, faster and cheaper" Intel IGP.The idea of an Intel IGP that simply isn't horrible is SOO strange that a true review would have to go the race: benchmarks, screenshots, minimum playable settings for various games and screenshots. Something the articles on HardOCP.
snakyjake - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Why isn't the i7-860 tested in the section "Windows 7 Application Performance"?Without the i7-860 in the Windows 7 test section, this review is pointless.
NeBlackCat - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
I was hoping to build a new always-on home server around one of these. Power miserly IGP and idle operation (for when it's only firewalling and routing) but plenty of grunt in reserve for occasional video encoding, compiling and running virtual machines.Looks like they missed the mark for this application, and I couldn't even adopt now and wait for the real deal CPU later, as the socket is a dead end.
IMHO only the HTPC crowd have a reason to be excited here, but there are lots of other (cheaper) ways to get low power 1080p too.
ruetheday - Friday, January 8, 2010 - link
Let's wait and see - There are products coming which will do gpu assisted transcoding that might shift things in Clarkdale's favor.bongbong - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
I know for a fact that the athlon II x3s and x4s have to overclock like crazy in games to reach the same performance delta as their phenom II x3 and x4 brethren(coz of the 6mb cache and many games are dependent on cache)
Ive seen gaming benchmarks on anandtech where the x3 720 matched the x4 965 when they are both overclocked to 3.8ghz.
I was able to buy an x3 720 for only a 110 usd recently.
So why isnt it in the benchmark comparisons?
JohnMD1022 - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
$150 from microcenter.