CoreI5-661

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  • Intel's Arrandale and Clarkdale CPUs get benchmarked for your enjoyment

    by 
    Darren Murph
    Darren Murph
    01.04.2010

    Whoa, Nelly! Just weeks after Intel came clean with its new Pine Trial nettop and netbook platform, the company is today cutting loose with a few more. This go 'round, we've got the 32nm Arrandale (which consists of the Core i5 Mobile and Core i3 Mobile) heading for the laptops and the 32nm Clarkdale chips over on the desktop front. Starting with the former, most reviews found the CPU + GPU solution to be faster than rivaling Core 2 Duo + integrated GPU options, with the Core i5 being particularly potent in highly threaded applications. Better still, battery life didn't seem to take a hit even with the extra performance, though high-end, high-res gaming was still a lesson in futility when working without a discrete graphics card. Overall, the chip was a welcome addition to the fold, but we got the feeling that the first wave was priced too high and offered too little of a performance increase on the gaming side to really warrant a wholehearted recommendation. As for the Clarkdale? The Core i5 661 that everyone seemed to snag was found to be blisteringly fast, with most folks deeming it the outright champion in the dual-core realm. Unfortunately, the integrated GPU was -- again -- not awesome for hardcore gaming, and the questionable pricing didn't exactly thrill some critics. Do yourself a favor and dig into the benchmarks below -- we get the feeling we'll be seeing oodles of machines hit the wires this week with these chips within. Update: Check out the Arrandale in action after the break! Arrandale reviews Read - HotHardware Read - AnandTech Read - Tom's Hardware Read - PCPerspective Read - Legit Reviews Clarkdale reviews Read - NeoSeeker Read - HotHardware Read - HardOCP Read - TechSpot Read - MissingRemote Read - AnandTech Read - PCPerspective Read - Legion Hardware Read - Overclockers Club Read - Bit-tech