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
Final Words
When I first started testing Clarkdale I actually had to call Intel and ask them to explain why this wasn't a worthless product. The Core i5 661 is priced entirely too high for what it is, and it's not even the most expensive Clarkdale Intel is selling! The Core i5 670 is going to retail for nearly $300 and it won't even be able to outperform $200 quad-core competitors.
Intel admitted that these high end SKUs aren't going to be very high volume. Most users are expected to opt for the Core i5 750 instead of the i5 661 unless they absolutely need Intel's HD Graphics for some bizarre reason. The real volume is going to be in the Core i3 and that's where I believe Intel has a real winner here. Unlike the entry-level Lynnfield, you don't give up Hyper Threading with the Core i3 540 and 530. All you lose is Turbo. And since these are dual-core CPUs, Intel's Turbo Boost doesn't buy you all that much extra performance (+133MHz or +266MHz at most).
With the i3s you get a great dual-core chip that is competitive with AMD's Athlon II X4 line in many multi-threaded applications. AMD sacrificed its L3 cache in order to bring four cores down to reasonable price points. Intel's Core i3s start with two cores, a complete cache hierarchy, and give you Hyper Threading to improve performance in those multi-threaded scenarios. If you're doing a lot of video encoding or 3D rendering AMD's cheap quad-cores are going to be a better option, but for nearly everything else (gaming included) you'll be better off with the Core i3.
Even the integrated graphics performance isn't terrible, but we'll have to wait and see how the i3s perform with their lower clocked IGP.
These things also overclock ridiculously well. We got 3.8GHz out of the i5 661 at stock voltage and I'd expect similarly sweet results out of the i3s. Turbo isn't really important for two cores, it's only with quad-core that it really starts to matter - so just grab an i3 and overclock the heck out of it.
For a HTPC there's simply none better than these new Clarkies. The on-package GPU keeps power consumption nice and low, enabling some pretty cool mini-ITX designs that we'll see this year. Then there's the feature holy-grail: Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD-MA bitstreaming over HDMI. If you're serious about building an HTPC in 2010, you'll want one of Intel's new Core i3s or i5s.
A huge selling point for corporate markets is going to be Clarkdale's AES-NI support. The impact on disk performance with Bitlocker enabled is noticeable. Enabling Bitlocker caused my testbed SSD to take a 15% performance hit in disk I/O on Clarkdale vs. over 30% with Lynnfield. If you need to enable disk encryption as a corporate requirement, Clarkdale (and Arrandale) is going to help improve performance tremendously. Couple it with an SSD and you're in business.
To conclude I can only go back to my only real complaints about Clarkdale. The off-die, on-package memory controller hampers performance. We've taken a step back in terms of memory latency, a step we can't correct until Sandy Bridge. I can't help but think that Clarkdale would be so much more competitive if it had Lynnfield's memory controller. I guess we'll have to wait a year to find out.
The other issue is that its pricing at the high end just doesn't make any sense. There isn't a single Core i5 I'd recommend, but the i3s are spot-on. To Intel's credit, though, if it priced the Core i5s more aggressively, I'm not sure there would be much room for AMD to compete. Perhaps killing competition isn't what Intel wants either....
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SydneyBlue120d - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
The Intel G9650 doesn't exist, what You're referring is Intel G6950http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43230">http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43230
puterfx - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - link
I've been building systems since the late 90's, mostly for others, and I'm always the last to get a decent system so I decided it was about time for me. I'm running an e6600 on a 3 yr old Intel board w/ 2g of DDR2 RAM and was wondering about the differences between C 2 quad, i3-540, i5-750 or i7-820. I priced out 3 different setups with Gigabyte boards (EP45, H57 & P55 - USB3 ver.) combined with Q8400/9300/9400 on EP45, i3-540,i5-750 and i7-820 on the H57 & P55 and 4 Gb DDR3 RAM (Crucial, Geil, Kingston)so , basically, I had 9 combinations. Excluding the i7, the price range for these builds was about $429 - $487, and I could probably do better if I tried but I was amazed that they were that close (the i7 adds another $100 but not that much improvement in performance that I can see).Looking at your charts, I think I can justify going with the i5-750. I have a decent video card for the occassional gaming that works pretty good for me now (I'll apply the $100 from above to a better card later) but I do a lot of spreadsheets and some photoshop and autocad so I think I'll see a better improvement there.
Thanks again for all your articles. Very well written, understandable and thorough.
KingAlexander - Saturday, January 30, 2010 - link
I too am puzzled by the i7 870 scoring so low on the World of Warcraft chart -- it stood out to me immediately when I first read the article. I was a little surprised to not see it mentioned.It was suggested in another comment that this was due to the game having an issue with hyperthreading, but if that was the case shouldn't the i7 920 also have scored significantly lower than it did?
Bloodx - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
It should be noted that this new intel system does not workat 1080p/24 correct. The nvidia 9400 chipset works at 1080p/24.
So i've traded audio for skipping.
HTPC is no better off. Sad.
geok1ng - Sunday, January 10, 2010 - link
Previous Intel IGPs managed achieve less terrible numbers in game by cheating- they didn't render all the polygons and textures. So for good measure i require side by side screenshots of the "new, better, faster and cheaper" Intel IGP.The idea of an Intel IGP that simply isn't horrible is SOO strange that a true review would have to go the race: benchmarks, screenshots, minimum playable settings for various games and screenshots. Something the articles on HardOCP.
snakyjake - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Why isn't the i7-860 tested in the section "Windows 7 Application Performance"?Without the i7-860 in the Windows 7 test section, this review is pointless.
NeBlackCat - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
I was hoping to build a new always-on home server around one of these. Power miserly IGP and idle operation (for when it's only firewalling and routing) but plenty of grunt in reserve for occasional video encoding, compiling and running virtual machines.Looks like they missed the mark for this application, and I couldn't even adopt now and wait for the real deal CPU later, as the socket is a dead end.
IMHO only the HTPC crowd have a reason to be excited here, but there are lots of other (cheaper) ways to get low power 1080p too.
ruetheday - Friday, January 8, 2010 - link
Let's wait and see - There are products coming which will do gpu assisted transcoding that might shift things in Clarkdale's favor.bongbong - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
I know for a fact that the athlon II x3s and x4s have to overclock like crazy in games to reach the same performance delta as their phenom II x3 and x4 brethren(coz of the 6mb cache and many games are dependent on cache)
Ive seen gaming benchmarks on anandtech where the x3 720 matched the x4 965 when they are both overclocked to 3.8ghz.
I was able to buy an x3 720 for only a 110 usd recently.
So why isnt it in the benchmark comparisons?
JohnMD1022 - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
$150 from microcenter.