Intel Core i5 661 Review

Testing:

Office 2007 Excel Big Number Crunch: This test takes a 6.2MB MIcrosoft Excel speadsheet and performs about 28,000 sets of calculations that many of the most commonly used calculations in Excel. The measure of this test is how long it takes to refresh the sheet.

Lower Is Better

POV Ray 3.7: This program features a built in benchmark that renders an image using Ray Tracing. The latest versions offer support for SMP (Symetric MultiProcessing) enabling the workload to be spread across the cores for a quicker completion.

Higher Is Better

PCMark Vantage x64 is used to measure complete system performance. We will be running a series of tests to gauge performance of each individual CPU to see which CPU, if any, rises above the others.

The Excel Big Number Crunch test has the i5 661 performing better than all of the AMD offerings, but still below the level of the Intel quadcore processors. POV Ray has the 661 ahead of the AMD dual and triple core processors. The i5 661, again, out performs all of the AMD offerings in this comparison in PC Mark Vantage.