Overclocking

Overclocking was done on our ASUS P55 board which does not support changing settings for the IGP of Clarkdale. If you're into overclocking, you're bound to fall in love with these two little cores that happily beat beneath Intel's heat spreader cover. Both models hit BCLK ~ 200 MHz resulting 4390 MHz for i3 530 and impressive 4570 MHz for i3 540. This was achieved with 1.35 V core voltage and with more experimenting, tweaking and better cooling I would bet 5 GHz or even beyond that is a possible result. Something worth exploring, maybe even doing a stand alone article. Overclocking was done with a Scythe Katana III set to Turbo profile in the BIOS. Below you can review Core i3 530 and 540 performance using overclocked settings.

dBpoweramp

x264 HD

Cinebench

Modern Warfare 2

System Power Consumption & Heat