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....
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
93 Comments
View All Comments
Taft12 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
The parent's office PC's aren't bottlenecked by the OS - they're not bottlenecked PERIOD. They run modern productivity apps just fine and would gain little to no benefit from Core i3 (or Windows 7 for that matter).Paulman - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Those office PC's you mentioned aren't bottlenecked by the 2GB of RAM. But I wouldn't say that they aren't bottlenecked, "period". What they ARE bottlenecked by is disk I/O, I'm sure. Throw in a good SSD and you would notice quite a bit of speed improvement, and probably a noticeable difference between the 1.6GHz and 2.4GHz machines.The most annoying thing to me whenever I'm using my PC is seeing and hearing my laptop HDD thrash around when launching an app or what not, because everything is held up as a result. Yes, I know it's a laptop HDD, but desktop drives are pretty slow, too.
FlyTexas - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
SSDs are indeed fast, and make the whole computer feel "snappier"...However, these office machines never shut down (they hibernate overnight). IE8, Word, Excel, and Acrobat are always open and always stay open. Once loaded in memory, the hard drive is hardly used.
I've looked at upgrading them to 3GB of RAM, but they aren't using what they have, so why bother? Most of them use right around 1GB of RAM most of the time.
Could we put 40GB SSDs in? Sure, they are about $130 at Newegg right now... Not the end of the world, until you multiply that times 24 machines. Not a minor expense.
FlyTexas - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
That is so true. This the first time in a long time that the computers have been "fast enough" for everything we use them for.There was a time in 1993/1994 that we were in this position, running DOS 6 and Windows 3.1 on 486DX2/66 machines, where the move to the DX4/100 or Pentium saw no benefit until Windows 95 came out. I worked in small shop back then, and we demoed a Pentium 66 machine, and saw zero benefit over the 486DX2/66 machines, other than it cost twice as much.
Perhaps in 2002, the Athlon XP machines were "fast enough" for Windows XP and Office XP, that was a nice time as well in the business. A Pentium III 550mhz was my last personal Intel chip until 2006, when I got my first Core2Duo machine at home. I had to work with some Pentium 4s at work during that time, Intel really, REALLY dropped the ball with the Pentium 4, IMHO.
Oh well... I've been doing this a long time, I still remember 5.25" floppy drives, with NO hard drive and those ugly green monitors with Hercules graphics... :)
lowlight - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
But the 45nm package on Westmere doesn't just carry the GPU. They also moved the PCI-E controller and Memory controller there. I guess the "CPU" is still technically 32nm, but compared to Nehalem, half the "CPU" actually resides on a 45nm package on the chip...You can see a diagram in this Clarkdale review: http://www.hardcoreware.net/intel-clarkdale-core-i...">http://www.hardcoreware.net/intel-clarkdale-core-i...
lowlight - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Guess I should have read the whole review... You guys picked it up too! Not many others did though ;)ilnot1 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I swear I've scoured the pages but I don't see your Test System Setup Chart: how much RAM, which graphics card? If it is there and I missed it I wish you could delete posts.Spoelie - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
It's on page 6I'd like to know the setup of each memory benchmark on page 2. What memory speeds and settings were used for the latency and bandwidth numbers?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
All of the CPUs used DDR3-1333 running at 7-7-7-20 timings for that test. I used Everest 1909 (I believe, I'm about 2300 miles away from my testbed right now :-P) and CPU-Z's latency tool to grab the data.Take care,
Anand
toyota - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I was looking for it too and its not there.