The Clarkdale Experiment: Mea Culpa
by Loyd Case on May 4, 2010 1:57 PM ESTNon-Game Performance
Ignoring generic performance benchmarks like Sysmark, I ran a couple of media encoding tests, POV-RAY 2.70 (beta 35a) and Cinebench 10. The idea wasn’t to make any definitive judgment about performance, but just get a feel for how the two CPUs might perform in memory intensive tests.
It’s no big surprise that the Core i5 750 outperforms Clarkdale; these apps are multithreaded, and physical cores will trump virtual cores in this class of application. As you can see, in both POV-RAY and Cinebench, Clarkdale’s single core performance is a little higher than Lynnfield – but the differences are much smaller than the even the 12.5% disparity in Turbo Boost peak clock speeds. It’s possible that the L3 cache size disparities have an impact.
But these systems are gaming systems, so let’s take a look at how they perform with games.
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kani - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
I think Lynnfield wins in some bandwidth intensive games because of the on chip pci-e bridge. The newer Clarksdale units lack this (at least to my knowledge) and so loose. I also recall this sort of advantage when the i5 750 came out and was tested vs the older i7 models. Some games like this extra bandwidth, others do not.7Enigma - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
I'll be honest. I read this just like any other review (rarely do I look at the author unless I'm going to post a response), and was left shocked at the poor quality.I'm not a grammar/spelling/etc. police so I could care less if punctuation is not perfect (probably my post is riddled with errors, sue me). I also don't particularly mind flipping back to previous pages because the descriptions of products are constantly being changed from one sentence to the next (but this is somewhat annoying). I'm also a pretty data oriented person so bland writing doesn't turn me off either. Let's say I'm pretty easy to please.
It's been beaten to death; we all know that in most modern games everything is GPU limited within reason (celeron to i7 is not within reason). Yes FarCry2 is the exception to the rule and it will be important to see if this trend becomes more common in the future, but for the most part the same article has been hashed out for the last 5 years (probably longer).
There is virtually nothing beneficial that can be gleaned from the tests run. By having so many variables from the HD, to the mobo, to the CPU, any data generated has no way of being understood. So for the 0.01% of people that have these 2 identical systems in their house congratulations, they can use this article to decide which to game on....
hob196 - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
Why do you use 'Lynnfield' and 'Clarkdale' in the article and 'i5' and 'i7' in the graphs, this is really confusing to the casual observer who doesn't know their chip code-names off by heart.ReaM - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - link
If you want to keep one of these systems until 2012, then i5 Dual Core will be a waste of money.When games will finally use all 4 cores - and most of the upcoming games certainly will, you people will regret buying a Dual Core.
Clarkdale is a no no no.
xrror - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
In the last paragraph: "If I were gulding an HTPC, I’d drop down to a lower priced CPU,"Although I must admit, "gilding" would be WAY more entertaining =D