Intel Core i5-3427U: Ivy Bridge For Ultrabooks

Test Methodology, HD Video and Quick Sync Transcoding

Test Methodology: As you'll note in the following pages of benchmarks, we've compared the Ivy Bridge mobile-equipped Intel Ultrabook to a few different machines, both standard notebooks and in some cases Ultrabook class products.  In every test case, we tried to leave each notebook as delivered to us from the manufacturers. This meant, after any pending Windows updates were installed, we disabled Windows update and also disabled any virus scanning software that may have been installed, so it wouldn't kick in during benchmark runs.  That said, it's virtually impossible to ensure identical system configurations between notebooks; so we'll caution you that reference scores from the various test systems are listed in order to give you a general feel for performance between these similar class of machines and not for direct, apples-to-apples comparisons.

HD Media Playback and Video Convserion
Preliminary Tests with Intel HD 4000 Graphics and HD Video

As a quick sanity check on CPU utilization, we first fired up a 1080p QuickTime video clip from the Apple QuickTime Movie Trailer gallery.  Here we've captured a scene from the movie I am Legend, so you can get a look at how Intel's new Ivy Bridge Core i5-3427U handles unoptimized HD video decoding workloads.

1080p H.264 Encoded QuickTime Trailer Playback

Windows Task Manager Performance monitor shows the new low power dual-core, four-thread capable chip is oscillating between 10 - 18% CPU utilization.

Cyberlink MediaEspresso
1080p AVCHD to 720p H.264 Transcoding and Compression

Cyberlink's MediaEspresso is a video conversion tool that imports various video media files types and converts them to other standard video types for publication, portability and streaming.  In this test, we take a 224MB high definition 1080p AVCHD video clip and convert it to a 720p H.264-encoded video file.  Here we're going to look directly at Intel's Quick Sync video transcode engine in the new Ivy Bridge Ultra processor architecture and compare it to Intel's previous generation Sandy Bridge Quick Sync engine and competitive GPU-based solutions as well. 


MediaEspresso in action with 12% CPU utilization running on Ivy Bridge

Times are measured in minutes:seconds with lower times representing faster throughput in the video conversion process.



The highlight numbers you want to take-away from this graph are shown at the very top and bottom here.  Intel's previous generation Sandy Bridge Core i7-2820QM quad core clips in at a blistering 14 seconds flat, only to be beaten by the new Core i7-3720QM Ivy Bridge CPU in half the time at 7 seconds.  However, Intel's new dual-core Core i5-3427U low power CPU clocks in at the 10 second mark, edging out its Sandy Bridge quad-core brethren by a healthy margin.

At the bottom of the stack is the new Core i5-3427U in software only mode. At only 17 Watts TDP it's the most power-conservative CPU of the bunch, however, and with Quick Sync disabled this result falls in line as expected.


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