Intel Core i3 540

A close relative of the Core i5 600 series processors, the Intel Core i3 530 is a dual-core CPU with integrated graphics.  If you pair it with an H55 motherboard, it can run your computer's display, but be warned that this built-in 'graphics card' isn't very powerful and can only be used for lightweight office work.

The technology on offer includes two cores and Hyper-threading.  Often known as simply 'HT', this system allows each core to emulate two cores, meaning that the OS 'sees' four cores instead of two.  This helps even out the load between the two 'real' cores and improve performance.  However, the i3 CPUs don't have a Turbo mode which would have helped speed things up when not all cores are in use at once.

Energy Consumption

Engineered at 32 nm, the Core i3 processors don't need much power.  When idle, our test computer required a total of 95 W, which is a very impressive performance that's repeated when it's working hard: power use only climbs to 137 W.

In the same test conditions, an AMD Athlon II X4 635 uses 130 W and 186 W respectively.  While the latter has four physical cores, it has broadly equivalent average performance.

Performance: Applications

The lack of Turbo mode doesn't count against the Core i3 540, which is a fairly average mid-range processor.  Complex programs do run, but more slowly than they would on a quad-core CPU.  The performance is good enough if you only need to use one them every now and again: if you don't have a lot of photos to edit or only want to work with video when you get back from your summer holidays once a year, then you'll get by just fine.


What's more, this processor is faster overall than the Athlon II X4 635, despite the latter having two more cores.  For instance, exporting photos from Adobe Lightroom 2.5 took 6 minutes 21 seconds on the i3 540 but 7 m 16 on its AMD rival.  However, the tables were turned when encoding x264 video, where the i3 took 7 m 6 s against the Athlon's 5 m 19 s.

]Performance: Gaming

If you've studied the results in our Face-Off, you'll see that the i3 is behind the Athlon II X4 when apps know how to handle the extra cores.  The opposite is true with games, though, where the Core i3 has a distinct advantage.

We found an average framerate of 50 frames per second when playing World in Conflict with maximum details on the Intel processor, but AMD only managed 40 fps.  With Crysis Warhead, which is more directly limited by the graphics card, the discrepancy is less pronounced at 47 fps against 45 fps.

View Performance Index Table