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
SYSMark 2007 Performance
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.
SYSMark performance is a strong point of the new Clarkdale family. The Core i5 661 is able to deliver overall performance roughly equivalent to the Core i7 860. If you aren't running heavily threaded code that can really stress all four cores of a Lynnfield or Phenom II, the Core i5 661 is going to perform very similarly.
The real winners however are the simulated Core i3 540 and 530. You give up Turbo Boost but you still maintain Hyper Threading, which delivers Phenom II X4 965 performance for $133. Obviously AMD will still win in most tasks that stress all four cores, but for the majority of users you'll actually have roughly the same performance out of an i3 530. Impressive.
These Clarkdale chips are also a significant performance improvement over the older Core 2 based products. The i3 530 looks to be around 17% faster than the Conroe based Core 2 Duo E6750. Even AMD's value quad-core chips can't compete here, but that's just because we're not really stressing all four threads.
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rainman1986 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I'm puzzled by the results for this cpu, I'd have thought it would be close to the 920, but it was much slower than the i3 and i5.Did I miss something?
rainman1986 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Sorry, not the 860, the 870 was slower (but the 860 would have been just a little slower than that!)Still, what gives?
deruberhanyok - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Possible responses:"I had no idea it had a retro mode!"
"So these processors can run Ultima IX acceptably then?"
"My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!"
"Intel HD graphics: bringing extreme video quality to 2001's hottest titles!"
And so on.
vol7ron - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
The Clarkdale Unencrypted score is shown, could you also display the Lynnfield Unencrypted score.To use the unencrypted Clarkdale as the control for Lynnfield doesn't seem right since there are differences between the two procs. It would make more sense to compare
[Lynnfield Encrypted Score]/[Lynnfield Unencrypted Score] to [Clarkdale Encrypted Score]/[Clarkdale Unencrypted Score]
Thanks,
vol7ron
SydneyBlue120d - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Thanks a lot for the great review!When You'll be back from CES, I'd like to see a test of:
- Pentium G9650 (the great absent for the corporate/office world);
- Flash 10.1 and BR/MKV HTCP with integrated gfx;
Thanks a lot :-)
SydneyBlue120d - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Forgot to ask:Is the integrated gfx DX 10 or 10.1? Will it support Direct2D?
Thanks
ruetheday - Friday, January 8, 2010 - link
yes to DX10 and Direct2Dvol7ron - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Raja,Good article. I like how you re-addressed topics that you originally discussed on the opening page, with a more concise statement on the pages that followed. For instance, when talking about the memory on/off die. You gave a decent bit of info on page 1 and then a quick rememberance on page 2.
--- More will come once I finish reading the artice :) ---
vol7ron
Rajinder Gill - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Credit goes to Anand for this piece. I only chimed in on the OC side. :)regards
Raja
vol7ron - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I noticed something fishy when it said thanks to Raja for the Mobo suggestion. I guess the article's author threw me off :)Great collaboration, regardless.