PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance

Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive

Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.

Data Recovery - par2cmdline 0.4 Multithreaded

Our Par2 test gets a nice boost from more cores, making the i5 661 overpriced in this case. The i3s however do very well, outperforming the Athlon II X4 630 and the triple-core Athlon II 435.

WinRAR - Archive Creation

Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:

WinRAR 3.8 Compression - 300MB Archive

The lighter the desktop workload (as in the fewer stressful threads you have running) the better Clarkdale does. The Core i3s are particularly sensible here. It's basically Intel's answer to the Athlon II X4 600 series.

Microsoft Excel 2007

Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.

Microsoft Excel 2007 SP1 - Monte Carlo Simulation

Intel believes that one of the biggest cases for Clarkdale in the business market is Excel performance. The Core i5 661 continues to be overpriced for what it is, but the i3 540 and 530 look very good here. They're can outperform the Athlon II X4 630 and draw less power. Nice.

Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation

Although technically a test simulating the creation of a Blu-ray disc, the majority of the time in our Sony Vegas Pro benchmark is spend encoding the 25Mbps MPEG-2 video stream and not actually creating the Blu-ray disc itself.

Sony Vegas Pro 8 - Blu-ray Disc Image Creation (25Mbps MPEG-2)

The i3s come pretty close to doing well in our Blu-ray creation test, but once again the i5 661 falls short thanks to its ridiculous price. The i3s are a reasonable alternative to the Athlon II X4 630.

Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation

Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.

Sorenson Squeeze Pro 5 - Flash Video Creation

Clarkdale isn't a good choice for this test, with the 661 matching the Athlon II X4 630. The i3 parts place below AMD quad-cores but above the tri-core offerings.

3D Rendering Performance Windows 7 Application Performance
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  • ssoussi - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link

    Check the Quick Reference Guide to Intel® HD Graphics on the official website:
    http://software.intel.com/fr-fr/articles/quick-ref...
  • kumargupta9 - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 - link

    I was doing a research on i3 vs. i5 vs. i7.. found many articles which this one as the best. Also found the following also useful. http://binaryday.com/2010/12/09/intel-core-i3-vs-c...
  • Hothead - Saturday, June 11, 2011 - link

    hey...
    i'm using dell N series system with 320 gb hard-disk,4GB Ram with grapic card nvidia 9500 GT installed but d problem started when i changed processor dual core to core 2 duo...& added 500 gb sata hard-disk...now my mother botherboard is crashed ...now i'm thinking 'bout i5 processor wid h55 mother board ...plz guide me...what should i do 2 upgrade my system so tht i can have a speedy pc with speed features & do support d games ...or don't ever again crash or something like tht...

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