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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marc1000 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Indeed, I want an Atom+ION, but it has not yet come to public availability in Brazil. And Intel is killing ION with the new Atoms, so I believe I won't ever see a Atom+ION board here, because the stores will only launch only the "newer" Atom boards (that is, IF they even launch it...)efficientD - Saturday, January 9, 2010 - link
The other problem with and atom setup is the low cost no L3 cache Athalons. With a decent 785G mainboard, you can get much better performance in only a slightly bigger package for about the same HTPC money. That is the direction I would go if I could build an HTPC right now.IntelUser2000 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
The reason for high idle and in some way, high load power is due to the Asus board. Not only that, but the H57 chipset.The Intel H55 mobo will lower power consumption enough to get it below the i5 750 and i7 860.
Kaleid - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Would these be chips on would dare to overclock considering the foxconn socket problems that has been reported here @ anandtech?Zool - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Its quite confusing now, with 9 desktop and 11 mobile i-xxx cores now. Not a single digit shows core numbers or the gpu on the new 32nm cpus.Actualy its a total mess now for a average user.
marc1000 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I second your opinion!!! Perhaps Intel hired some marketing folks from Nvidia!!! =DHarry Lloyd - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
So which chip is responsible for HDMI Audio - the CPU, or the H5x chipset?Can we get HDMI audio support with a Lynnfield CPU?
And one other thing - I assume we can use HDMI audio without haeving to use the integrated GPU (for display) when we have a PCI-E card?
DigitalFreak - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
The GPU on the processor.Alberto - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
The main problem is the Motherboard, likely an early sample not much optimized. Both Xbit Lab and The Tech Report have found a lower idle system power consumption in the new Intel plataform versus the Lynnfield solution. Maybe This article needs of a fast update :-)Alberto - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
The italian site www.hwupgrade.it have discovered even better results. Over an Intel DH55TC motherboard this new cpu is IMPRESSIVE at idle.Intel seems right again.