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
SYSMark 2007 Performance
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.
SYSMark ends up being a fairly lightly threaded test, optimized mostly for dual core processors. As such, the Athlon II X3 doesn't really get much benefit from that third core and ends up being more of a Penryn competitor than in the same class as the Core i5/i3 and Pentium G6950.
As a business desktop machine, the Pentium G6950 is a competant option. Clearly slower than the Core i3 530 but not much else. The faster dual core i5s do well here.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
For a photoshop workstation, Intel's quad-core i5 can't be beat by anything in the i5 lineup - even if you spend more than $200. The Pentium G6950 doesn't do so well here. While it's faster than the Pentium E6300, it's slower than the Core 2 Duo E7500 and AMD's Athlon II X3 440. Photoshop likes to spawn CPU intensive threads and thus Hyper Threading actually matters here. You'll want at least an i5 if you're building a good Photoshop box.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
70 Comments
View All Comments
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
Fixed and fixed :)hyvonen - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
Anand,Looks like i5-670 was dropped from idle power plot... Care to add it? :)
FlameDeer - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Yes, i5-670 idle power is missing at http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">page 8.We can find the results as 73.1W at CPU Bench here:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?b=51&a...">http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?b=51&a...
But the results of i5-660 & Atom D510 are really missing at CPU Bench.
Example of Atom D510 vs Athlon II X2 255, which showing no results:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=110&...">http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=110&...
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Fixed and fixed :)Intel's Atom D510 is now included in Bench :)
Do you believe there's a need for the i5-660 in Bench even though we have a 661 in there? They provide the same application performance and we have no integrated graphics tests in Bench.
Take care,
Anand
FlameDeer - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Hi Anand, thanks for all the fixed. :)I agree with you about i5-660 & i5-661 both having same application performance (because no integrated graphics tests), they also having same price too.
Only power consumption will have some different, but i5-660 & i5-661 are using different OS & GPU here:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">i5-660 Power Consumption - Windows Vista + GeForce GTX 280
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">i5-661 Power Consumption - Windows 7 + Radeon HD 5870
If not taking much time, adding i5-660 data will make Bench even more complete & will definitely benefits readers who specifically choose 660 for some reasons.
You have really done a great job by building up this Bench function for all readers, with so much of hard works & efforts in running all the tests! Please help me remove my first reply at above which contain link code error to save the precious comments space here. Thanks & take care. :)
hyvonen - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
Thanks for adding the i5-670 idle power here!This may be a bit too much to ask, but I would really like to see the i5-6xx series idle powers measured without the high-power graphics card.
Many HTPC rigs use in-package graphics to reduce heat generation and noise, and might get left on for extended periods of time... So idle power with integrated graphics only would be a useful metric.
FlameDeer - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Yes, i5-670 idle power is missing at http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">page 8.We can find the results as 73.1W at CPU Bench here:
[L]http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?b=51&a...[/L]
But the results of i5-660 & Atom D510 are really missing at CPU Bench.
Example of Atom D510 vs Athlon II X2 255, which showing no results:
[L]http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=110&...[/L]
Kibbles - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
"To paragraph a short, wise, green man"I think you meant paraphrase :)
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - link
haha woops! fixed :)Take care,
Anand
bombacan - Monday, April 5, 2010 - link
these cpus has vtd support, diffent from i3a and i5 750, i5 661.as far as i know vtd needs also mobo support. so youll need a Q chipset.
for general use i dont think these cpus are preferable to any 4 core att similar price
gpu on the cpu is bullshit (not the idea, but the gpus are and will be), get a i3 or i5 750 and a standalone cheap card. it is obvious that these cpus are made for companies etc.