The Clarkdale Review: Intel's Core i5 661, i3 540 & i3 530

Windows 7 Application Performance

We're testing out a few new additions to our Bench database, so what we've got here are some updated application tests run under Windows 7. The CPUs compared are going to be different since we don't have as much historical data, but we'll be building it up over the coming months.

x264 HD Encoding Performance

It's what you've all been asking for - our x264 encoding test with an updated version of x264. In this case we're using TechARP's x264-HD 3.03 bench and x264 version 1342.

As expected. The dual-core chips just can't compete with the triple and quad-core competitors.

7-zip Benchmark & Performance

We use WinRAR for our compression test under Vista, but more and more users are switching to 7-zip. The performance is more CPU dependent so we're going to look at it. First up is the built in 7-zip benchmark:

With no I/O bottlenecks the benchmark scales very well with CPU speed and core count. As a result, our faithful Clarkdales don't look all that great. In the real world though, Clarkdale performance (at least from the i3s) is respectable.

Here we're taking the same 300MB set of images from our WinRAR test and are compressing them using 7-zip. We divide file size by completion time to get compression speed in KB/s:

Sonar 8 Multi-track Audio Export

We've had some requests for digital audio workstation benchmarks so we're adding a multi-track audio export from Sonar 8. Performance is expressed in KB/s:

This is one of those situations where the i5 661 performs well for its price, but the real stars are the i3 540/530 again. They perform like CPUs much more expensive than they are.