A not-quite-so-budget budget chip from Intel? It overclocks well, but that's about the only really good thing we can say...
Intel's new range of 32nm processors are known in the industry as A Big Dealä. They've got advertisements running everywhere from your television set to the radio; on billboards and boxes, and for those who pick up IR transmissions from orbiting satellites, they're transmitting through them as well. For all the fuss kicked up about them, the first 32nm chip from Intel we looked at wasn't so amazing - though their second iteration of 32nm tech, the hexa-cored Gulftown, was in-frickin-credible. We're looking at the budget version of the first chip today, though you'd be hard-pressed to guess that with a pricetag of $170.
The majority of this added cost comes not from the amount of traditional processing cores carried onboard (two for those interested), but rather from the integrated graphics core. Although this is contained within the CPU, and shares the umbrella of the Integrated HeatSpreader (IHS), the graphics core is physically separated from the processing cores, instead sharing the same silicon wafer or 'package'. In effect, the Northbridge has moved from the motherboard to the processor, and to fulfil the display output requirements you've also gotta have a H55/57 based motherboard that knows how to play along nicely.
This design is rife with drawbacks. In the process of adding in the (depressingly barely-able-to-accelerate-HD-video) graphics core, Intel have infuriatingly ripped the memory controller out of the processing cores and have moved it in with the GPU! Not only does this mean that latency times are goshdarn hideous even when compared to a budget AMD chip, but it also means that pure memory bandwidth numbers take a hit, too. And in usual Intel fashion, this chip is arbitrarily limited to a max stock memory speed of 1333MHz.
Thankfully the processing cores aren't too shabby; giving pretty good-lookin' scores in all single-threaded and multithreaded benchmarks. The inclusion of HyperThreading lends a hand to the Cinebench scores, but gives a fantastic result to the memory-hungry wPrime - a 2.46 speed increase compared to a single core, which comes from the much-reduced need to access data. Instead, the second core shares the already-fetched workload, and thus HyperThreading works its magic.
Overclocking was an easy affair even with the included stock heatsink, a cooling device that contains about as much metal as a nugget has actual chicken. We were able to push the chip all the way up to 4267MHz with 185x23 at 1.432V, netting a lovely performance jump. OCCT and Cinebench multi were run concurrently at these settings on the stock heatsink alone; and the system didn't crash once. Strangely, once we changed heatsinks to our trusty TRUE, overclocking headroom didn't increase at all. We tried clearing CMOS settings, playing around with voltages, sacrificing virgins to the mountain gods - nothing seemed to work.
That said, we're not complaining about a 39 per cent overclock in the slightest. We will, however, complain about exactly where this chip is intended to go - and that it's not aimed at us. For the $170 asking price, you get a dual-core CPU that's relatively capable, and a GPU that is as appealing as fish custard. Throw in at least $130 for a motherboard that can use it all (though P55 will give you access to just the processing cores), and you're looking at $300 - whereas a competing AMD option will give you quadcore with a decent graphics chip for even less money. For an office system, the Core i3 series are pretty ok. For a HTPC, they leave us wanting - and for a gaming rig they're a terrible choice. In short, nothing that we'd run at home.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012