The Clarkdale Experiment: Mea Culpa
by Loyd Case on May 4, 2010 1:57 PM ESTWhat About Power?
One of the main points of building a Clarkdale system was power usage. Let’s take a look at power usage differences, first at idle, then full throttle.
Okay, here’s where Clarkdale shines, especially when you dial up the clock speed. At full throttle, the Lynnfield / P55 combination consumes 189W versus 126 for the Clarkdale system. This translates into heat generated as well.
On the other hand, the goal for this system was to build a compact gaming system. Low power usage would have been ideal for, say, a home theater PC with a lower cost graphics card. If this is really a LAN party gaming rig, the added power draw isn’t as big a deal.
If we postulate playing games four hours a day, five days a week, all year round, the difference in power draw translates to 65KWh over an entire year – and that’s a lot of gaming. That translates to $20 or so spread out over the entire year at $0.30 per KWh. In reality, few people run their gaming rigs full throttle four hours a day – even if they’re playing four hours a day.
Anand was Right
The higher cost SKUs of Clarkdale seem overpriced for the performance you get. Given that the true quad core Core i5 750 and the dual core Core i5 661 are roughly priced at parity, Lynnfield is a better deal. Bear in mind that we’ve been running Lynnfield at its default 2.67GHz clock, too. If you overclock, the story just gets better.
Even power usage doesn’t translate to huge savings in our particular usage model. If I were gulding an HTPC, I’d drop down to a lower priced CPU, and a graphics card with less power draw (and costing less.) For a gaming system, though, Lynnfield looks like a much better solution.
Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa.
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kani - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
I think Lynnfield wins in some bandwidth intensive games because of the on chip pci-e bridge. The newer Clarksdale units lack this (at least to my knowledge) and so loose. I also recall this sort of advantage when the i5 750 came out and was tested vs the older i7 models. Some games like this extra bandwidth, others do not.7Enigma - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
I'll be honest. I read this just like any other review (rarely do I look at the author unless I'm going to post a response), and was left shocked at the poor quality.I'm not a grammar/spelling/etc. police so I could care less if punctuation is not perfect (probably my post is riddled with errors, sue me). I also don't particularly mind flipping back to previous pages because the descriptions of products are constantly being changed from one sentence to the next (but this is somewhat annoying). I'm also a pretty data oriented person so bland writing doesn't turn me off either. Let's say I'm pretty easy to please.
It's been beaten to death; we all know that in most modern games everything is GPU limited within reason (celeron to i7 is not within reason). Yes FarCry2 is the exception to the rule and it will be important to see if this trend becomes more common in the future, but for the most part the same article has been hashed out for the last 5 years (probably longer).
There is virtually nothing beneficial that can be gleaned from the tests run. By having so many variables from the HD, to the mobo, to the CPU, any data generated has no way of being understood. So for the 0.01% of people that have these 2 identical systems in their house congratulations, they can use this article to decide which to game on....
hob196 - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
Why do you use 'Lynnfield' and 'Clarkdale' in the article and 'i5' and 'i7' in the graphs, this is really confusing to the casual observer who doesn't know their chip code-names off by heart.ReaM - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - link
If you want to keep one of these systems until 2012, then i5 Dual Core will be a waste of money.When games will finally use all 4 cores - and most of the upcoming games certainly will, you people will regret buying a Dual Core.
Clarkdale is a no no no.
xrror - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
In the last paragraph: "If I were gulding an HTPC, I’d drop down to a lower priced CPU,"Although I must admit, "gilding" would be WAY more entertaining =D