Synthetic Benchmarks

Possibly the best known and widely used synthetic benchmark, 3D Mark Vantage tests the gaming performance of the PC. PC Mark Vantage on the other hand tests other performance aspects of the PC like video encoding, home entertainment multimedia features, working in an office environment, and basic gaming.

Lower clocks and lack of Turbo Boost make an impact in performance with synthetic benchmarks, but both Core i3 530 and 540 are not that far away from the much more expensive i5 661 model

3D Mark Vantage v1.0.1.

PC Mark Vantage v1.0.1.

wPrime 1024M and SuperPI 1M

wPrime is a benchmarking application designed to use a highly multithreaded approach to calculate the square-roots of large amounts of numbers, while SuperPI calculates pi number to a specified number of digits after the decimal point. Both applications are primarily used by overclockers to check the stability and performance of overclocked CPUs. It's clear from results that wPrime is multithreaded benchmark that uses all of the cores no matter if they are simulated with HyperThreading while SuperPI uses just one core.