Before digging into our review sample let’s take a quick look at the Clarkdale lineup and supporting platform.

Like all LGA 1156 CPUs Clarkdale integrates the functions previously handled by a chipset's north bridge into the CPU.  While similar to earlier Core i5 chips in this way, Clarkdale also has some significant differences.  The biggest is that the GPU has also been integrated onto the CPU package, in addition all Clarkdale CPUs are manufactured using a 32nm process technology (the GPU is 45nm) and are dual core processors.  

The Clarkdale family is comprised of three discrete lines of CPUs; Core i5, Core i3 and Pentium G6XXX.  Each line has a slightly different set of features; to make the feature discussion easier please refer to the cheat sheet below.

As we can see every chip in the family except the i5-6X1 (e.g. i5-661, our review sample) carries a 73W TDP.  At first look this seems a bit high for a CPU aimed at the HTPC enthusiast, but it’s critical to remember that this is the TDP for both the CPU and GPU, which is actually quite good.  Taking a closer look it becomes clear why the i5-6X1 carries an 87W TDP, as the GPU runs at 900MHz instead of 733MHz like the rest.   The extra MHz won’t help for any of our use cases making it of more interest to the casual gamer.

The only notable feature missing from the i3 versus the i5 is Turbo Boost.  Turbo Boost is an interesting feature where a single core temporarily runs at a faster speed, so for example a single core on the 3.33GHz i5-661 can run at 3.6GHz; a nice boost for single threaded applications.

Both the i5 and i3 support Hyper-Threading (HT); don’t worry Pentium 4 owners this time it’s a good thing (21% gain in Handbrake transcoding).  Both also support full dual-stream hardware accelerated (HWA) video decoding (i.e. Blu-ray picture-in-picture) for MPEG2, VC-1 , and AVC/H.264 as well as HD codec bit streaming (yes, you read that right; bit stream TrueHD and DTS-MA – huzzah!).  Rounding out the notable specs is VT-x, which while not a huge feature is a nice to have if the HTPC also serves time as a PC and you want to use XP Mode in Windows 7.

Where the i5 and i3 are quite similar the G6XXX gets stripped down; losing HT, dual stream video HWA, and one of the more compelling features to HTPC enthusiasts - HD codec bit streaming.   That said, it should still be a competent performer, very similar in practice to results achieved with a G45 based HTPC (although if that’s what you want an E5300 + DG45ID is a better deal).  Personally, if budget was an issue I’d probably try to cut the $26 difference to the base i3 out somewhere else.

Technically there are four chipsets that will support the Clarkdale family; H55, H57, Q57 and P55.  The P55 has been out since September and makes up the “technically” because while a Clarkdale CPU will run in it, the GPU won’t; so for the purpose of this review it will be ignored.

The H55, H57 and Q57 chipsets are almost identical in feature set; most of the differentiators are aimed at the corporate market.  The only relevant differences between the three are the number of USB ports (H55 can have twelve and H57/Q57, fourteen) supported and that boards based on H57/Q57 can optionally support RAID. 

Intel will have five boards available; three micro-ATX, one ATX and one mini-ITX.  See the break-out below for the details.

The lineup is pretty thorough, but only the DH55TC (our review sample) will have global availability immediately and should come in at around $100.  There will also be boards from other motherboard manufacturers available immediately as well.

Enough background, let’s dig into the good stuff.

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