General Performance

While in power consumption tests energy-efficient AMD processors proved quite capable of competing against dual-core LGA1156 rivals from Intel, the situation in performance tests is somewhat sadder. Dual-core LGA1156 processors are indisputable faster than any energy-efficient Athlon II CPUs, even including a quad-core model, in PCMark Vantage measuring the overall system performance, Photoshop CS5 graphics editor, WinRAR archiving utility or iTunes 9 software media center. In all other tests, only Athlon II X4 615e proves fast enough. For example, the quad-core Athlon II X4 620e works faster than Core i3-530 during HD video encoding using x264 codec, final rendering in Cinema 4D or chess play in Fritz benchmark. However, it can’t outperform a faster Clarkdale CPU – Core i5-661. In other words, Intel products offer better performance-to-power consumption ratio, even if we compare Clarkdale CPUs against energy-efficient AMD Athlon II processors, and not the regular ones.