If you took a look at our gaming benchmarks you quickly realize that Intel's Clarkdale IGP is definitely not made for gaming. Its performance is one order of magnitude below that of even the cheapest discrete graphics cards like the Radeon HD 4550 or the GeForce 210. While many games will be playable at incredibly low detail settings and resolutions up to 1280x1024, most current games live from the graphics eye candy they come with. On the other hand you have to consider that you did not have to buy an actual graphics card - you get what you pay for.
Intel's graphics drivers are unable to compete with what ATI and NVIDIA offer in game support, I encountered numerous games where the drivers has issues ranging from crash at startup to rendering errors in-game and everything in between. This affects older and newer titles equally, but as you should know by now: this GPU is not for gaming.
Intel's Core i5 661 excels when it comes to Windows Aero, HD video decoding and HDMI audio. There are no driver issues, everything simply works and it works well. This makes Intel's new processors a very good choice for a media PC system. But then you could just stick with other IGP solutions from AMD and Intel which offer the same features at the same or lower platform cost. As our testing shows there is no significant reduction in power consumption with these new processors, which is what I personally had high hopes for.
If you are into tweaking and overclocking, then you will stay disappointed by Intel's offerings. Whereas you have a large choice of utilities and software for AMD's and NVIDIA's products, Intel does not give you any serious tweaking features at all. You have to rely on motherboard vendors to include such features in the BIOS or via included software.
Overall I think Intel missed the price point on their new processors, if prices can go down substantially Clarkdale could become a viable alternative in the office/OEM system market. In the long run, with Intel making improvements to their processors, for example by putting GPU and CPU on the same 32 nm die and FDI graphics capable chipsets becoming more widespread, this could turn out to be a serious threat to vendors of low-power integrated chipsets like AMD, NVIDIA and VIA.