
The 4.4 GHz Core i3 dual-core is fast enough to compete with the Core i5-750 quad-core. Once again, the Core i5-661 delivers greater performance than the Core i3-530 at the same nominal clock speed. This stems from the Turbo Boost feature not supported on Core i3 CPUs.

Cinebench on one thread scales nicely with every megahertz of clock speed.

Once Cinebench is switched to multiple threads, the Core i5-750 comes out on top. The other results scale with their clock speed.

Photoshop users clearly need a multi-core processor. The image editor benefits more from additional execution cores than from increased clock speeds.

The chess software Fritz scales best with additional processing cores, but the clock speed increases lead to linear performance gains, as well.

7-Zip is very computing-intensive if you run LZMA2 and medium or higher compression.


- Cranking Up Core i3 To 4.4 GHz
- Intel's Core i3-530 CPU
- Gigabyte's P55A-UD7 Motherboard
- Overclocking Settings: 2.93 GHz To 4.4 GHz
- Test Setup And Overclocking Table
- Benchmark Results: Synthetics
- Benchmark Results: PCMark And 3DMark Vantage
- Benchmark Results: Applications And Archiving
- Benchmark Results: Power Consumption
- Benchmark Results: Single- And Multi-Threaded Efficiency
- Benchmark Results: Overall Efficiency
- Best Overclock And Conclusion