Intel Core i3 530 and i3 540

Photoshop CS4 Retouch Artists Speed Test

A must-have tool for all photographers and graphics designers, Adobe Photoshop allows you to create wonders out of poorly taken photos. Retouch Artist Speed Test is used to test performance of processors. A small Action Script does a lot of layer and effect work on test image and it manages to produce some good multithreading load on processor cores.

You could say Core i3 models did a double K.O. in Photoshop with i3 530 beating triple core Phenom II and the faster i3 540 model keeping up with some slower quad core processors, and only ~2 seconds off from i5 661.

Cinebench R10 64bit

3D rendering tools are also used to test CPU performance. Cinebench R10, Blender and POV Ray simulate real world performance with integrated benchmark scripts. 3D rendering has been Intel's home ground for a long time, but AMD is making progress with its new models and is not that far behind Intel's processors.

Load up all the cores available and both Core i3 models lag behind quad core processors but again Hyper Threading is keeping them highly competitive against AMD's fastest triple core Phenom II X3 720.

Blender 2.49

POV Ray 3.7b 64bit