AES-NI Performance Analyzed; Limited To 32nm Core i5 CPUs

Test Setup And Benchmarks

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System Hardware
Hardware Details
Motherboard (LGA 1156) MSI H55M-ED55 (Rev. 1.0) Chipset: H55 BIOS: 1.11 (01/04/2010)
CPU Intel Intel Core i5-661 (32nm, 3.33 GHz, 2 x 256KB L2 and 4MB L3 Cache, TDP 87W)
RAM DDR3 (dual) 2 x 2GB DDR3-1600 (Corsair CMD4GX3M2A1600C8)
Hard Drive Solidata K5 SLC Flash SSD SATA/300, 64MB Cache
Graphics Zotac GeForce GTX 260² GPU: GeForce GTX 260 (576 MHz), Graphics RAM: 896MB DDR3 (1,998 MHz), Stream Processors: 216, Shader Clock: 1242 MHz
Power Supply PC Power & Cooling, Silencer 750EPS12V 750W
System Software & Drivers
Operating System Windows 7 Ultimate X64 Updated 2010-01-11
Drivers and Settings
Intel Chipset Drivers Chipset Installation Utility Ver. 9.1.1.1025
Nvidia Graphics Drivers Version 8.16
Application Benchmarks and Settings
Benchmark Details
7-zip Version 9.1 beta 1. Syntax "a -r -ptest -t7z -m0=LZMA2 -mx1 -mmt=8" 2. Syntax "a -r -ptest -t7z -m0=LZMA2 -mx9 -mmt=8" 3. Integrated Benchmark Benchmark: THG-Workload
BitLocker Windows 7 integrated Encrypt RAM-Drive (330MB) Benchmark: THG-Workload
WinZip 14 Version 14.0 Pro (8652) WinZip Commandline Version 3 1. Syntax "-stest -ycAES256 -a -el -p -r" 2. Syntax "-stest -ycAES256 -a -e0 -p -r" Benchmark: THG-Workload
Synthetic Benchmarks and Settings
Benchmark Details
Everest Version: 5.3 Zlib and AES Benchmark
PCMark Vantage Version: 1.00 Communications Suite
SiSoftware Sandra 2009 Version: 2010 .1.16.10 Processor Arithmetic, Cryptography, Memory Bandwith

The competition for this review: Intel’s LGA 1156-compatible Core i7-870 quad-core.