Intel Clarkdale Core i5 Desktop Processor Debuts

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR3-1333 with 8,8,8,24 timings. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems  Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2010c  Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2010c, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the suite with Intel's new Core i5 661 processor (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth).  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 3.33GHz with 4GB of DDR3-1333 RAM running in dual-channel mode, although Turbo mode was enabled as well.

The new Intel Core i5 661 performed well in the SiSoft SANDRA benchmarks that we ran.  Because the processor is HT enabled, it can process up to 4 threads simultaneously on its two physical execution cores, thus it performed in-line with some of Intel's quad-core processors and was clearly the fastest Intel dual-core CPU. Memory bandwidth was also very good, with numbers approaching the 12GB/s range.