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
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
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:
As with video encoding, this sort of test greatly benefits from more CPU cores. The 661 places just below the Q9400 while the i3 parts place at or below the level of an old Q6600. All the new parts are faster than the Core 2 Duo CPUs, but that's as good as it gets.
Cinebench R10
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.
Clarkdale's saving grace is its single threaded performance. The 661 can run at up to 3.60GHz when only a single thread is active, giving it better single threaded performance than anything else on the chart here. The majority of desktop performance is still bound by the performance of a single thread. That's where Clarkdale will shine.
Even the turbo-less i3s do very well here despite their "low" clock speed. The i3 530 is almost as fast as a 3.33GHz Wolfdale and slightly faster than a Phenom II 965. The low latency L2 helps Clarkdale a lot here.
There's no substitution for more cores. Run four CPU intensive threads and Clarkdale loses its edge.
POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
POV-Ray is the worst for Clarkdale. Even the Athlon II X4 630 can outperform the i5 661. The i3s are pretty close in performance to the 661 though, they at least offer a better value.
Blender 2.48a
Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.
Blender is the opposite of POV-Ray, showing more of a best-case for 3D rendering on Clarkdale. The 661 still doesn't make sense based on price, but the i3 parts surpass everything except the Q9400 in this test.
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Jamahl - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
If this is a sign of things to come from intels 32nm, AMD must be laughing their asses off.Every one of these cpu's is an overpriced piece of garbage.
ereavis - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Phenom II X2 550 should be on this list, it's the direct competitor to the i3 -- dual core with real cache. It beats the Athlon II X4 processors and the Athlon II X2 don't even belong.ereavis - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
blasted no edit function. The 550 is also about the same price point.Guess I didn't combine criticism with the fact that this review was exactly what I've been waiting for and very well written, I like the added IGP page as I'm sitting on a 785 IGP while discrete cards are in between releases. All of which may get passed on to my mom's dying Sempron if an I3 deal pops up.
Also minor correction, the Phenom II 925 is an X4. Where are the release dates?
SilentSin - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I second your question to Intel about the pricing of the 32nm i5 chips...who the hell is going to buy that? The i3's are looking pretty sweet as an alternative to an AMD HTPC platform at that low price point, though. March should make for an interesting competition once AMD launches their new RD890G (4350 based) chipsets. I'm guessing those will thoroughly trounce the GMA part on these chips as well as having quite a few features that the Intel HD stuff can't do, but at least Intel put something up that isn't completely laughable for once.Cogman - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
x264 is NOT a codec. Let me repeat that, x264 is NOT a codec. It is an ENCODER. The video output from x264 is in the H.264 standard (or codec if you like).Saying that x264 is an alternative to H.264 is retarded. It isn't an alternative, it USES the H.264 standard. Its like trying to say that mySQL is an alternative to the Ansi SQL standard. It isn't an alternative, it is an implementation of it.
puffpio - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
hahaha..that always gets on my nerves too!but you can take it as a compliment that x264's popularity is strong enough that people mistake it for h264..
people make the same mistake with divx, kleenex, qtip, xerox, etc...
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
My apologies for sounding like a fool :-) I've updated the text. I just meant that it was an alternative to closed source H.264 encoders but my phrasing was absolutely horrendous for that purpose.Thanks for pointing out the error :)
Take care,
Anand
proneax - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I would like to see you measure the power consumption on the DH55TC using the integrated graphics.Legitreviews shows Idle/Load of 49/99W for the 661 in that setup.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Agreed - I'll do it as soon as I'm back in the office. Just gotta survive CES :)Take care,
Anand
medi01 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Dual core 3.3Ghz CPU + Radeon 5870 consuming only 110 watt at load???