Everest Benchmarks

EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems. Furthermore, complete software, operating system and security information makes EVEREST Ultimate Edition a comprehensive system diagnostics tool that offers a total of 100 pages of information about your PC.

I tested the ASUS P7H55D-M EVO motherboard both with a Core i5-661 processor and a Core i5-750 processor. For the Core i5-661 tests, I ran both at the stock clock speed of 3.33GHz as well as the highest stable overclock I could reach, 4.64GHz. I'll go into more detail on the overclocking aspect in another section.

All of the CPU benchmarks used in our test bed— Queen, Photoworxx, ZLib, and AES— rely on basic x86 instructions, and consume very low system memory while also being aware of HyperThreading, multi-processors, and multi-core processors. Since these tests large isolate the processor and memory subsystem from the rest of the computer, they're ideal for direct processor-to-processor comparisons. To test the effects of the iGPU on performance, I ran the tests with the iGPU providing video as well as with a separate graphics card, whose use automatically disables the iGPU.

Clarkdale processors like the i5-661 move the memory controller from the CPU die to the iGPU. This might have been necessary to give the iGPU tighter control of the shared memory it must use for a video buffer, but performance suffers: whille significant improvement in bandwidth is possible with overclocking, it's still not enough to compete with the much slower-clocked (2.67GHz) i5-750. ASUS can design their board to support these very high overclocks, but they can't do anything about the 661's memory controller. Removing the iGPU from the test (by inserting a graphics card, which disables the iGPU) improves scores very slightly— a maximum of only 3.6%.

Everest CPU testing is another story, where the overclocked 661 edges out the stock-clocked 750 in two of the three tests (the AES test results are not shown here since the 661's "New AES" instructions give it over ten times the AES performance of the i5-750, which causes the rest of the chart to scale down too far to read! For details, see our review of the Intel Core i5-661 BX80616I5661 processor).

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