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
3dsmax Performance
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:
For a 3D rendering workstation the choice should almost always be more cores. The Athlon II X3 440 is a bit faster than the Pentium G6950 here and the more expensive Core i5 6xx CPUs are easily trumped by the quad-core 750.
Cinebench R10 Performance
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
Here we have the one redeeming quality of the dual core i5 lineup: great single threaded performance. Even the Pentium G6950 offers better single threaded performance than other CPUs way above its pay grade.
Crank up the thread count however and things go back to normal. The Pentium G6950 does better than AMD's dual core offerings, but isn't nearly as good as the X3 440.
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know of fence - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
Unlike to the apologists above, it should be obvious to most readers that testing power consumption with discrete graphics further dilutes results, especially regarding power savings.Even if Anandtech absolutely cannot do those tests (because of bench), at least a mention of the EVGA Graphics card's idle power consumption (~ 25W ?) in the description would be really helpful. So readers who care about absolute watt power could then subtract it from benched measurements, to get a meaningful power consumption estimate for a non-gaming- PC.
ReaM - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Qimonda DDR3-1066 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20)Corsair DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20)
Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 2 x 2GB (7-7-7-20)
Which one is used for O'Clocking?
I need a good OC ram! :P I dont know which company
Thank you!
Calin - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Try to post in the forums, you might be luckierReaM - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
yeah, but these were used here in that test setupekul - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
I don't think anyone is going to buy this chip at their local computer shop. Even for a cheap HTPC you'd be much better off to get a full clarkdale for the hyperthreading and turbo mode.This chip was built so OEMs like Dell and HP can keep the base price of their H55-based systems low to entice buyers. It's also as much CPU as any CSR or assistant is going to need in the corporate world.
arnd - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
It appears that there are two more Clarkdale processors, the Celeron G1101 (with just 2 MB L3 cache) and the Xeon L3406 (with 30 W TDP but graphics disabled).xpax - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Good job, Anand, as usual.I don't keep up on the hardware front as much as I used to, and having just built a new i5-750 system I was concerned for a moment as I hadn't heard about these new chips before doing my build.
After seeing the numbers though, I'm 100% sure I made the right choice.
iwodo - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
I want SandyBridge, i dont know why i never liked this generation architecture. I still have the perception ( no matter how much benchmark i read ) that it simple doesn't offer any performance improvement over C2D or those previous cheap Core2 Quad.Spending $100+ ( or $200+ since you need to upgrade your MB ) simple doesn't make sense. I would rather buy a Fermi / 58xx or Sandforce Based SSD.
kaleun - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
As a C2D owner I also don't see much reason to upgrade to an i3. but if I needed more performance, the i5/i7 would be worthwhile. and many people might upgrade from something older than C2D. If I started a PC from scratch, the i3 for $ 120 is really really good compared to everything else in that price range if one considers power consumption and overclocking.Obviously, someone who buys an i3/i5/i7 today won't see much reason to upgrade to Sandy Bridge either. But starting from an older platform (even C2Q), Sandy Bridge will be worthwhile. I almost think, unless you are power user, one always is best off skipping every other CPU generation.
the thing I wonder, for someone who builds a new platform today, why would anyone buy a new C2D is beyond me. My E7400 still costs $ 120 like over a year ago when I bought it. No way I'd buy that over an i3.
Calin - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
You could buy an C2D for common installed base (with similar mainboards as other PCs you have installed). Or you might buy one for the perfect last-generation board you buy for a new computer.There might be other reasons, but I don't have one of them right away