Clarkdale Efficiency: The Perfect Clock Rate For Intel's Core i5-661

Benchmark Results: Application Benchmarks

AVG’s virus check doesn’t benefit much from the faster clock speeds. This doesn’t necessarily apply to all anti-virus programs, though. We're looking into other AV suites, since the latest versions of this one have just fallen off with regard to scalable results.

3ds Max scales in a linear fashion, but this application can benefit much more if you go for a quad-core processor rather than trying to coax additional performance from a dual-core chip. You’ll almost halve the rendering time at similar clock speeds. Check out our current Desktop CPU Charts on 3ds Max for details.

PDF creation happens noticeably faster for our 115-page PowerPoint document. While the process takes 1:35 at stock speeds, the same PDF finishes in 1:17 at a 4 GHz nominal speed (4.16/4.32 GHz Turbo Boost).

There are noticeable benefits for image processing using Photoshop, as well.

WinZip 12 isn’t optimized to take advantage of additional cores, but it does benefit from any clock speed increases. This is another one we plan to replace, as there isn't much room left for compression/decompression titles that aren't written with parallelism in mind.

Fritz 11 is a chess program that takes advantage of multiple cores and clock speed increases.