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
Power Consumption: Great but not as Good as Lynnfield
The biggest efficiency advantage Lynnfield held over Bloomfield was its extremely low idle power consumption. Clarkdale seems to ruin that thanks to its 45nm IMC/GPU on package. Idle power isn't bad, but noticeably worse than Lynnfield. Update: Many have pointed out that this may be a characteristic of our ASUS H57 motherboard, and that idle power is much more reasonable on Intel's H55 board. We're currently in Las Vegas for CES but upon our return we'll look into this further.
Load power is just dreamy though. This is ultimately what makes Clarkdale competitive. The i3s have the performance to compete with AMD's low-end triple and quad-core CPUs, but if they're anything like the i5 661 they have much better power characteristics than the competition.
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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.