Intel Core i5-4310M vs Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400

Core i5-4310M vs Core 2 Quad Q9400 comparison

Our benchmark analysis concludes that the Core 2 Quad Q9400 performs better than the Core i5-4310M. Despite this, the Core i5-4310M has the advantage in our gaming benchmark.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core 2 Quad Q9400 has significantly more cores with 4 cores compared to the Core i5-4310M that has 2 cores. But they both have the same number of threads. With our hardware info, we find that the Core i5-4310M has a slightly higher clock speed than the Core 2 Quad Q9400. A Core i5-4310M CPU outputs less heat than a Core 2 Quad Q9400 CPU because of its 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 i5-4310M has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.