The Clarkdale Review: Intel's Core i5 661, i3 540 & i3 530

3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test

Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:

As with video encoding, this sort of test greatly benefits from more CPU cores. The 661 places just below the Q9400 while the i3 parts place at or below the level of an old Q6600. All the new parts are faster than the Core 2 Duo CPUs, but that's as good as it gets.

Cinebench R10

Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.

Clarkdale's saving grace is its single threaded performance. The 661 can run at up to 3.60GHz when only a single thread is active, giving it better single threaded performance than anything else on the chart here. The majority of desktop performance is still bound by the performance of a single thread. That's where Clarkdale will shine.

Even the turbo-less i3s do very well here despite their "low" clock speed. The i3 530 is almost as fast as a 3.33GHz Wolfdale and slightly faster than a Phenom II 965. The low latency L2 helps Clarkdale a lot here.

There's no substitution for more cores. Run four CPU intensive threads and Clarkdale loses its edge.

POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance

POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.

I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.

POV-Ray is the worst for Clarkdale. Even the Athlon II X4 630 can outperform the i5 661. The i3s are pretty close in performance to the 661 though, they at least offer a better value.

Blender 2.48a

Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.

Blender is the opposite of POV-Ray, showing more of a best-case for 3D rendering on Clarkdale. The 661 still doesn't make sense based on price, but the i3 parts surpass everything except the Q9400 in this test.