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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Jamahl - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
If this is a sign of things to come from intels 32nm, AMD must be laughing their asses off.Every one of these cpu's is an overpriced piece of garbage.
ereavis - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Phenom II X2 550 should be on this list, it's the direct competitor to the i3 -- dual core with real cache. It beats the Athlon II X4 processors and the Athlon II X2 don't even belong.ereavis - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
blasted no edit function. The 550 is also about the same price point.Guess I didn't combine criticism with the fact that this review was exactly what I've been waiting for and very well written, I like the added IGP page as I'm sitting on a 785 IGP while discrete cards are in between releases. All of which may get passed on to my mom's dying Sempron if an I3 deal pops up.
Also minor correction, the Phenom II 925 is an X4. Where are the release dates?
SilentSin - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I second your question to Intel about the pricing of the 32nm i5 chips...who the hell is going to buy that? The i3's are looking pretty sweet as an alternative to an AMD HTPC platform at that low price point, though. March should make for an interesting competition once AMD launches their new RD890G (4350 based) chipsets. I'm guessing those will thoroughly trounce the GMA part on these chips as well as having quite a few features that the Intel HD stuff can't do, but at least Intel put something up that isn't completely laughable for once.Cogman - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
x264 is NOT a codec. Let me repeat that, x264 is NOT a codec. It is an ENCODER. The video output from x264 is in the H.264 standard (or codec if you like).Saying that x264 is an alternative to H.264 is retarded. It isn't an alternative, it USES the H.264 standard. Its like trying to say that mySQL is an alternative to the Ansi SQL standard. It isn't an alternative, it is an implementation of it.
puffpio - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
hahaha..that always gets on my nerves too!but you can take it as a compliment that x264's popularity is strong enough that people mistake it for h264..
people make the same mistake with divx, kleenex, qtip, xerox, etc...
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
My apologies for sounding like a fool :-) I've updated the text. I just meant that it was an alternative to closed source H.264 encoders but my phrasing was absolutely horrendous for that purpose.Thanks for pointing out the error :)
Take care,
Anand
proneax - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I would like to see you measure the power consumption on the DH55TC using the integrated graphics.Legitreviews shows Idle/Load of 49/99W for the 661 in that setup.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Agreed - I'll do it as soon as I'm back in the office. Just gotta survive CES :)Take care,
Anand
medi01 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Dual core 3.3Ghz CPU + Radeon 5870 consuming only 110 watt at load???