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- Date:
- Sunday , January 03, 2010
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Intel Westmere 32nm & Clarkdale Core i5-661 Review
Intel fuses its new 32nm Westmere processor along with its 45nm GPU onto one package. This is Intel's new Clarkdale CPU that will be officially known as Intel Core i5-6XX and Intel Core i3-5XX series processors. Today we look at the Core i5-661 which we compare to the Core i5-750, Core i7-965, and AMD Phenom II X4.
Test Systems
We set up our test systems here today in order to give a good cross section look at just what the Clarkdale might supply the computer hardware enthusiast.
Our graphs are set up with our first i5-661 speed being underclocked to 2.66GHz. We thought this would give us a good low end baseline to compare to the i5-750 processor that is stock at 2.66GHz and has been an incredibly popular overclocker, even with it lacking HyperThreading from its 4 cores.
We then show our i5-661 at its stock 3.33GHz which we can compare with the i5-750 and i7-965 at 3.2GHz, although at these speeds, keep in mind the i5-750 and i7-965 have much more memory bandwidth.
Finally we cap off with our Core i5-611 overclocked a cool 1GHz to 4.33GHz running a memory bus of 1650MHz. For a rock solid 4.33GHz we used a vCore of 1.3v.
The i5-661 Processor
You might notice that the Intel Core i5-661 processor we are testing here today has sort of an odd sounding model number with the "1" on the end. If you looked at the chart on the first page you will notice it seems a little out of place. Here is why.
And here is the chart again.
Our i5-661 carries a higher TDP than even the i5-670. This is due to its "overclocked" graphics core. The i5-661 graphics core runs at 900MHz where every other model runs at 733MHz. Obviously Intel wanted this model in the hands of reviewers, if they were in fact going to waste time on gaming benchmarks or canned benchmarks.
Our New Motherboard
Our new AUS P7H57D-V EVO motherboard of course has the new Intel H57 chipset.
For the most part it is the same chipset as the P55, but of course the appropriate additions have been made to handle the processors video out.
Sadly we had issues with the P7H57D-V EVO. No doubt the board is very new and not fully tested with all the different configurations we used with it. We could not get the DVI-D out to work on the board, however the SVGA worked fine at 1920x1200 although it surely did not produce an image up to par with DVI-D. We could also get neither of our Blu-ray players to work properly with the ASUS motherboard. We did however have great Blu-ray success with our Intel H55 motherboard, the DH55TC. Surely the motherboard makers have a ways to go as the platform is simply not mature yet. Happily though, most Clarkdale i3 and i5 processors will be served up in machines that are fully built and tested.
We used the ASUS P7H57D-V EVO because we wanted a motherboard we could easily overclock and that is one thing the P7H57D-V EVO did well.
