Intel Westmere 32nm Launch & Clarkdale Core i5-661 CPU Review

System Benchmarks: Photoshop CS4 / Lame Front End

Photoshop CS4

For the image editing portion of this review, we will use Photoshop CS4 in coordination with Driver Heaven’s Photoshop Benchmark V3, which is an excellent test of CPU power and memory bandwidth. This is a scripted benchmark that individually applies 15 different filters to a 109MB JPEG, and uses Photoshop’s built-in timing feature to provide a result at each test stage. Then it’s simply a matter of adding up the 15 results to reach the final figure.


Proving to be not much more than a dual-threaded worload, the Photoshop CS4 benchmark allows the Core i5-661 to surpass all but the i7-870.

Lame Front End

Lame Front End v1.0 is a single-threaded application, which means that it only utilizes a single processor core. This will obviously limit performance but it will allow us to gauge a processor's single-threaded performance as well as test any turbo feature that it might have. We will be encoding a WAV rip of Santana’s Supernatural album and converting it to MP3 using the highest fidelity VBR 0 quality preset.


As a single-threaded app, LFE allows the i5-661 and i7-870 to utilize their 3.6Ghz Turbo Boost capabilities and thus destroy the rest of competition.