Intel Core i5 661 

In our first gaming benchmark, the i5-661 holds the tiniest of performance advantage over the i5-750.

It offers full decoding for H.264, VC-1, and MPEG2.

With the shrink to 32nm, we were excited to see how far we could crank the CPU speed up with reasonable voltage.

iTunes only makes use of 2 threads for the encoding to MP3 here, so with a higher clock speed the i5-661 outpaced the i5-750 by 6 seconds!

It is important to keep that in mind as you look at the price list above, as 3 of the CPU’s listed are equal to, or more expensive than the Core i5-750 CPU, which is a 4 Core/4 Thread part.

In the middle is the HDMI 1.3 interface.

It has been a long time coming, but Intel has finally brought Nehalem performance to the small form factors.

Sandra 2010c has a dedicated benchmark built-in that measure cryptographic performance, which is important on the new Intel Arrandale processors like the Core i5 540M that we are benchmarking today include features like AES-NI!

Results: The Intel Core i5-661 blows away its bigger, more powerful brother in the AES benchmark, while the i5-750 holds an advantage in the Hashing test.

Yes, it has a graphics core integrated into the CPU package.

But it's a decidedly feeble graphics core of little value to gamers.

For a dual-core processor, it's awesome.

When asked, Intel responded by saying “Intel is working with key software players to enable Blu-ray Stereo 3D on Intel graphics.

But the fact remains this latest integrated graphics core from Intel is effectively worthless for gaming.

While it isn't ideal for gaming, the Intel HD Graphics passes itself off nicely.