so with the release of the new core I3 and core i5 dual core processors Intel
has made their product line potentially one of the most confusing out there
today but I'm going to try and clear that up a little bit so today I've got
the I3 540 so this is the faster of the two i3s that are available at launch and
what the I3 540 is is it's very similar
to the socket 1156 core i7s and core i5s
with a couple key differences first of all an i
3500 series is a dual core processor
with hyperthreading okay so it has four
logical processors even though it only has two physical processors this
actually provides some real world benefit in terms of any sort of
multi-threaded tasks that you're going to be performing like video editing
stuff like that okay what it doesn't have compared to the new dual core Core
i5 600 series is turbo boost and turbo
boost is an incredibly important feature for the core I series processors because
it takes that stock frequency which in this case is 3.06 GHz and in some case
it boosts it up as much as three speed bins depending what you're doing with
the processor okay so that's one reason to go for a core i5 500 series versus an
I3 or sorry 600 series versus an I3 500
series now when you step up to the Core i5700 Series the difference you're
looking at is you lose hyperth threading but you gain two physical cores so
that's a quad core processor so even though it doesn't have hyperthreading
it's a much faster multi-threaded
machine compared to the Core i5 600 series which are dual cores with
hyperthreading and compared to the core I3 I think I've rambled enough now I
think the point should be pretty much
this the core I3 is a Core Series
processor that has hyperthreading but no
turbo boost okay there we go let's just open this thing and be done with it okay
so inside we're going to find our Intel warranty card installation instructions
and Intel Inside logo label so there's your little core I3 sticker that you
want to stick on your case or wherever it is you want to put it then inside we
will also find a CPU we'll have a look at that later and a heat sink now I
can't believe how wussy Intel has made these heat sinks I mean like seriously
for reference here's the heat sink on a
on a 5750 like low-end video card you look at
that that's like the same size pretty much might even be bigger on the video
card so I mean something that I've recommended to a lot of customers who
are buying uh low-end core i5s and i3s
that come with this heat sink is to just grab an aftermarket heat sink just grab
a cheap one like an Arctic cooling freezer 7 Pro rev 2 it's a great little
heat sink and it'll outperform this especially if you want to do overclocking now that's not to be down
on the Intel engineering team because a big part of why you can use such a small
heat sink on this processor is because it is so efficient it uses very little
power it outputs very little heat and it will not die under the cooling of this
little tiny fan heat sink it's just that if you want the best temperatures and
again if you are overclocking or pushing the limits of your processor then you
want to make sure that you throw some better cooling on it that's all so here
you can see the core I3 itself like I said before this is a socket 1156 chip
or LGA 1156 I should say so that means
that on the bottom of the ship you'll find 1,156 little pads that will make contact
with your motherboard okay now also launching with the core I3 and the new
Core i5 dual cores are the h55 motherboards now the biggest difference
okay between an h55 and a p55 is support
for Onboard video but the Onboard video
is not actually on the motherboard it's on this chip so the new dual cores all
have integrated video processing units right
under the heat spreader there so that means that if you take a core I3 or a
new Core i5 dual core and you install it on a p55 board it will work but the p-55
board won't have support for the integrated Graphics chip that is on this
processor so you won't actually have a VGA port to plug your monitor into or a
DVI port or whatever else you need likewise if you take a core i7 1156 chip
or a core i5 quad core and plug it into an h55 board you'll have those ports on
the back of the motherboard like a DVI port but you won't actually have a
graphics processor on the CPU to drive it so it won't actually work so that's
another tidbit that is really interesting about the new core i3s and
core i5 dual course thank you for checking out my unboxing of the core I3
540