In the past 17 pages, I have unconsciously worked like mad to atone for choosing a liberal arts major. The amount of information we've foisted upon you is otherwise inexcusable, I'm aware. If you will permit me, I'd like to turn things around by saying a few words about the primary subjects of our attention today.

The contest between the Core i3-530 and the Athlon II X4 635 boils down to a few simple considerations. For about the same price as the Core i3-530, the Athlon II X4 635 offers four cores that perform better in applications that rely heavily on multiple threads, such as video encoding, 3D rendering, and Folding@Home. In other uses, such as video games and image processing, these two CPUs perform almost identically. The Athlon II X4 635 leads slightly in overall performance and, as we established on the previous page, in terms of performance value. If that's all you care about when choosing a processor, then your decision has been made.

The trade-off here is that our X4 635 system draws 50W more than the i3-530-based one when engaged, a consequence of the fact that Intel requires only two 32-nm cores to achieve throughput similar to four AMD cores at 45 nm. The X4 635's power draw isn't unreasonable by desktop PC standards, but the i3-530's is exceptional. That fact alone might not be enough to persuade me to prefer the i3-530 for my own system. Combine it with the overclocking headroom we've seen from our two Clarkdale processors, though, and I'm sold. The prospect of a near-50% overclock, and the speed that goes with it, has me salivating. Either of these CPUs is a pretty good choice, but I'd make mine a Core i3-530—along with an embarrassingly tall tower cooler.

That's what I'd choose between our two headliners, at least. I suppose I should say a word or two about the cheaper processors, as well. The Athlon II X2 255 and the Pentium E6500 pretty much tied in our overall performance index and, heck, in quite a few individual tests. They both passed our gaming tests with acceptable frame rates, and for general use, they'll blow away a "nettop" processor like a dual-core Atom. They'd be practically interchangeable, if the X2 255 didn't draw an extra 28W of power at peak. The E6500 may be older Intel technology, but it still has the X2 255 beaten.
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Before we go, we can't ignore the fact that our overall leader in both power efficiency and performance per system cost was the Core i5-750. If you're purely rational about these things—and you can afford to spend nearly $200 on a CPU—the i5-750 is obviously the best choice among the processors we tested.

I'd also like to pour out a 40 for my homie who couldn't be with us, the Core i7-860. At $284, the i7-860 improves on the i5-750 by adding higher clock speeds and Hyper-Threading to the mix at the same 95W TDP. We suspect the i7-860 might be Intel's most appealing desktop processor. Perhaps soon we'll have the chance to test one—you know, what we really need is more data—but based on a few things we already know, we wouldn't hesitate to recommend one now.