Core i5-661 CPU Review

Cinebench 10

Cinebench 10 is based on the 3D software, Cinema 4d. It is very useful to measure the performance gain given by having more than one CPU installed on the system when rendering heavy 3D images. Rendering is one area in which having more than one CPU helps considerably, because usually, rendering software recognizes several CPUs. (Cinebench, for instance, can use up to 16 CPUs.)

Since we were interested in measuring the rendering performance, we ran the test called “Rendering x CPUs,” which renders a “heavy” sample image using all available CPUs (or cores – either real or virtual, as on CPUs with Hyper-Threading technology, each core is recognized as two cores by the operating system) to speed up the process.

On Cinebench
Phenom II X4 965 was 28% faster than Core i5-661, both with integrated video. This was expected, as Phenom II X4 is a quad-core CPU, while Core i5-661 is a dual-core CPU with Hyper-Threading technology. Core i5-750 was 33% faster than Core i5-661 for the same reason. Installing a GeForce 9600 GT didn’t improve performance, as expected.