Intel Core i3-530 Clarkdale Processor Review - Low Price Performance

Media Encoding Tests

LAME 3.97a MT MP3 Encoder

This version of the LAME MP3 encoder is multi-threaded and takes advantage of two threads.

Intel Core i3-530 Clarkdale Processor Review - Low Price Performance - Processors 73

Intel Core i3-530 Clarkdale Processor Review - Low Price Performance - Processors 74

Because of the dependence on a single thread for the majority of the work in our LAME MP3 encoding test the Core i3-530 performs pretty close to even the most expensive competition.

Windows Media Encoder x64

WME is a great video encoding application that supports WMV9 HD codecs and more.

Intel Core i3-530 Clarkdale Processor Review - Low Price Performance - Processors 75

Intel Core i3-530 Clarkdale Processor Review - Low Price Performance - Processors 76

The Core i3-530 continues to get bested by anything else released in the last two years but isn’t far off the mark.

VirtualDub

VirtualDub is a great application for just about any kind of video conversion but our testing we are using the DivX codec to shrink a collection of videos.

Intel Core i3-530 Clarkdale Processor Review - Low Price Performance - Processors 77

Intel Core i3-530 Clarkdale Processor Review - Low Price Performance - Processors 78

The Core i3-530, a dual-core HyperThreaded processor, is able to outperform the Core 2 Q8400 true quad-core processor but falls behind the Q9650 and the other Nehalem options.

Handbrake

Known mainly for its DVD re-encoding prowess, our test uses the Handbrake command line interface.