Intel Core i3-550 vs Intel Core i5-3230M

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

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Other Benchmarks
Specifications
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Intel Core i5-3230M

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 129.95

$ 99.99

$ 29.96 slightly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

A combined score of all workloads

1048 points

1086 points

3% slightly better overall score

Gaming Score

The raw gaming performance with a fast GPU

1976 points

2128 points

7% slightly better gaming score

Multitasking Score

Performance in workloads using up to 8 cores

795 points

812 points

2% slightly better multitasking score

Heavy Workload Score

Performance in workloads using up to 16 cores

763 points

780 points

2% slightly better heavy workload score

Free CPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

9.59 points

17.73 points

84% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (multi) score

Multi threaded benchmark

911 points

1041 points

14% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (multi) score

Geekbench 5 (single) score

Single threaded benchmark

417 points

523 points

25% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (single) score

Geekbench 6 (multi) score

Multi threaded benchmark

899 points

1017 points

13% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (multi) score

Geekbench 6 (single) score

Single threaded benchmark

437 points

505 points

15% 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

23% slightly higher clock speed

2.6 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

927th of 1,089

Family

The product line

Core

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2010 May

2013 February

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 i5-3230M benchmarks

Our benchmark analysis concludes that the Core i5-3230M performs better than the Core i3-550. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i3-550 in all gaming tests too.

Our spec comparison shows that they have an identical amount of cores 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 i5-3230M. The Core i5-3230M 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.

Most CPUs have more threads than cores. This technology, colloquially called hyperthreading, improves performance by splitting a core into multiple virtual ones. This provides more efficient utilisation of a core. Indeed, the Core i3-550 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.