Intel Core i3-550 vs Intel Core i5-3210M

Compare Intel Core 2 core CPU vs Intel Core 2 core processor, specs and benchmark score. Which is the better CPU for gaming?

Benchmark Score
Other Benchmarks
Specifications
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Intel Core i5-3210M

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 129.95

$ 39.99

$ 89.96 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

A combined score of all workloads

1048 points

1066 points

1% slightly better overall score

Gaming Score

The raw gaming performance with a fast GPU

1976 points

2093 points

5% slightly better gaming score

Multitasking Score

Performance in workloads using up to 8 cores

795 points

796 points

0.13% slightly better multitasking score

Heavy Workload Score

Performance in workloads using up to 16 cores

763 points

Identical

763 points

Free CPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

9.59 points

16.49 points

71% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (multi) score

Multi threaded benchmark

911 points

974 points

6% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (multi) score

Geekbench 5 (single) score

Single threaded benchmark

417 points

480 points

15% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (single) score

Geekbench 6 (multi) score

Multi threaded benchmark

899 points

993 points

10% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (multi) score

Geekbench 6 (single) score

Single threaded benchmark

437 points

489 points

11% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (single) score

Specifications

Cores

Number of physical processing units

Identical

Threads

Number of logical processing units

Identical

Clock Speed

Base frequency at which the chip operates

3.2 GHz

28% slightly higher clock speed

2.5 GHz

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the CPU

73 W

35 W

108% significantly lower TDP

PCIe Lanes

Number of physical connections between the CPU and expansion slots

Identical

Memory Channels

Lanes for simultaneous memory access

Identical

Supported Memory

Maximum amount of RAM supported by this CPU

38 GiB

18% slightly more supported memory

32 GiB

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

934th of 1,089

931st of 1,089

Family

The product line

Core

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2010 May

2012 May

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

DDR3-1066

DDR3-1333

Supports ECC memory

Does this CPU support error correcting memory

Core i3-550 vs Core i5-3210M comparison

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark tool, the Core i3-550 is faster than the Core i5-3210M. Despite this, the Core i5-3210M has the advantage in our gaming benchmark.

Info from our database shows that they both have the same core count and the same number of threads. With our hardware info, we find that the Core i3-550 has a slightly higher clock speed than the Core i5-3210M. The Core i5-3210M outputs less heat than Core i3-550 thanks to a significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

The more cores a CPU has, the better the overall performance will be in parallel workloads such as multitasking. Many CPUs have more threads than cores, this means that each physical core is split into multiple logical cores, making them more efficient. Indeed, the Core i3-550 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.