The Rest of Clarkdale: Intel's Pentium G6950 & Core i5 650/660/670 Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 24, 2010 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
The rest of the Clarkdale lineup performs quite well, but our issue has never been with its performance - rather its price. The closer you get to spending $200 on a CPU the better off you'll be buying a Core i5 750 instead. It's also a shame that Intel offers such a wide range of integrated graphics performance. It would do a lot more for its image as a supplier of mediocre graphics if all Clarkdale chips offered 900MHz+ graphics.
The Pentium G6950 is a dangerously good competitor to AMD's dual-core CPUs. It outperforms AMD's Athlon II X2 255 and Phenom II X2 555 in pretty much all applications, however it lags behind in gaming performance. Intel's 32nm process gives it the edge in power consumption as the Pentium G6950 draws less power than any competing part from AMD.
The problem is the Athlon II X3 440. It's pretty much faster than the Pentium G6950 across the board and is even a little cheaper to boot. You lose out on the integrated graphics, but you get an extra core and better performance in most applications. Honestly the only reasons you'd pick the G6950 over the Athlon II X3 440 are if you need lower power consumption, better performance in single threaded applications or want to build a HTPC (note that TrueHD/DTS-HD MA bitstreaming is not supported on the Pentium G6950, only on the Core i3/i5). They are valid reasons but if pure performance is all you care about, then AMD offers more bang for your buck.
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Taft12 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Citation needed? I've worked with many Intel and AMD systems (mostly Linux however) and never ran into a problem with AHCI. Also, is SATA performance truly impacted assuming you are using mechanical hard drives?KaarlisK - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
A citation regarding the performance:http://techreport.com/articles.x/18539/8">http://techreport.com/articles.x/18539/8
http://techreport.com/articles.x/18539/7">http://techreport.com/articles.x/18539/7
And USB/PCI/PCIe performance (or CPU usage) is also worse:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/18539/9">http://techreport.com/articles.x/18539/9
And a direct quote from TechReport:
"Unfortunately, AMD's longstanding issues with AHCI Serial ATA controller configurations persist in the SB750, all but forcing users to run the south bridge in plain old IDE mode. That's not the end of the world, but IDE mode doesn't support Serial ATA perks like hot swapping and Native Command Queuing."
As for problems getting it to work at all, the views are conflicting: http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=36&am...">http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=36&am...
But the fact is, I've had problems installing Win7 in AHCI mode on SB700, then tried the same drive with the ICH7MDH in AHCI mode, and it worked flawlessly.
CSMR - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
Advice: If you're going to measure power consumption you should use more appropriate components. People have been getting <25W system idle with some of the Clarkdales.Question: are video acceleration features available for all the Clarkdale processors here?
AtenRa - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
The numbers at Idle are with the GTX280 (i guess) and not with the intergraded Graphics. ;)clarkn0va - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
You seem to have missed a couple distinguishing features of the new LGA1156 Pentium. First, it supports ECC when paired with Intel's 3450 chipset. I'm still trying to figure out why (or why Intel doesn't include ECC support on all their CPUs, like AMD does).Second would be the "Embedded" designation. I'm not exactly sure what Intel is trying to denote with that, as this is no Atom or Geode with a TDP of 73 Watts.
http://download.intel.com/pressroom/kits/embedded/...">http://download.intel.com/pressroom/kits/embedded/...
Perisphetic - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
I think the major reason is the FUD of how well would the server CPUs fare if Intel did release ECC for the desktop family of CPUs. The problem is that LGA 1156 slots everything from i3, i5, i7 to Xeons. With the proper BIOS you can run a server board with an i7 or vice versa a Xeon in a desktop motherboard. If i7 did have ECC who would buy the Xeons at twice the price. Sure the Xeons have some fancy server features but if you could buy an ECC enabled i7 at half the cost no one would even consider the Xeons.clarkn0va - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
"if you could buy an ECC enabled i7 at half the cost no one would even consider the Xeons."Right. Which makes me wonder why this pentium has ECC enabled. It's not an i7, but it's enough of a CPU to fit the bill on many servers, and will take some business away from the higher-priced low-end Xeons.
has407 - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
Embedded means Intel will continue to ship the product for 7+ years. That designation is applied to many different products from CPU's to chipsets, and includes (some) high-power parts.SgtSpoon - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
How can the G6950 outperform the i3 530 in fallout 3?SgtSpoon - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
Also : "As a gaming CPU the Petnium G6950 is on par with the Athlon II X3 440 in our Fallout 3 test"Petnium? :)