Overclocking: Get The Performance Of A Core i5 From Core i3

Features
By
Published

Intel’s $115 Core i3-530 doesn't include Turbo Boost technology and it doesn't boast hardware-based AES-NI, but it overclocks like a fiend. We benchmarked this dual-core, HT-equipped chip at 4.4 GHz and determined the most power-efficient overclock.

Test Setup And Overclocking Table

Swipe to scroll horizontally
System Hardware
Hardware Details
Performance Benchmarks
Motherboard (Socket LGA 1156) Gigabyte P55A-UD7  (Rev. 1.0); Chipset: P55; BIOS: F4
CPU Intel Intel Core i3-530 (32 nm, 2.93 GHz, 4 x 256KB L2 and 4MB L3 Cache, TDP 73W)
CPU Intel II Intel Core i5-750 (45 nm, 2.66 GHz, 4 x 256KB L2 and 8MB L3 Cache, TDP 95W, Rev. B1)
CPU Intel III Intel Core i5-661 (32 nm, 3.33 GHz, 2 x 256KB L2 and 4MB L3 Cache, TDP 87W, Rev. B1)
RAM DDR3 2 x 2GB DDR3-1333 (OCZ3G2000LV4GK 8-8-8-24)
Graphics Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 GPU: Cypress (725 MHz), Graphics RAM: 1,024MB GDDR5 (2,000 MHz), Stream Processors: 1,440
Hard Drive Western Digital VelociRaptor, 300GB (WD3000HLFS), 10,000 RPM, SATA 3Gb/s, 16MB Cache
Power Supply Enermax Pro 82+, EPR425AWT
System Software & Drivers
Operating System Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Updated on 2010-03-03
Drivers and Settings
Intel Chipset Drivers Chipset Installation Utility Ver. 9.1.1.1025
Intel Storage Drivers Matrix Storage Drivers Ver. 8.​9.​0.​1023