Legit Processor Reviews

ASUS K42F Notebook w/ Intel Core i5 540M Arrandale CPU Review

Manufacturer: Intel
Product: ASUS K42F-B1 14
Date: Sun, Jan 03, 2010 - 11:00 PM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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SiSoftware Sandra 2010c

Sisoftware Sandra 2009

The Sisoft Sandra 2010c benchmark utility just came out a few weeks ago and we have started to include it in our benchmarking. Sandra 2010 now comes with support for Virtualisation (Virtual PC/Server, Hyper-V, VMware) and GPGPU (OpenCL, DirectX 11 DirectCompute, but today we will be using the program to look at memory and CPU performance!

Sandra 2009 SP2 Benchmark Scores

Results: Sandra 2010b showed that the ASUS K42F notebook with its 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3 memory ran circles around the HP DV4-1555 notebook and its 4GB 667MHz DDR3 memory modules. With nearly 9 GB/s of memory throughput these new Arrandale based notebooks have as much memory bandwidth as the highend desktops had just a few years ago. Notebooks have clearly gotten much faster!  Let's take a look at CPU performance using Sandra.

Sisoftware Sandra 2009

The Sandra Processor Multi-Media benchmark has been a long time favorite of ours to look at floating point performance on processors, so let's see how Intel's latest 32nm mobile processor does!

Sandra 2009 SP2 Benchmark Scores

Results: Once again the Intel Core i5 540 32nm 'Arrandale' processor out performed the Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 45nm 'Penryn' processor as you can see from the chart above.

Sisoftware Sandra 2010c

Cryptography has become an important part of our digital life: it allows us to conduct safe transactions online, certify programs and services, keep our data secure and much more. Sandra 2010c has a dedicated benchmark built-in that measure cryptographic performance, which is important on the new Intel Arrandale processors like the Core i5 540M that we are benchmarking today include features like AES-NI! Intel AES-NI is a new set of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions that are going to be introduced in the next generation of Intel processor, as of 2009. These instructions enable fast and secure data encryption and decryption, using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), defined by FIPS Publication number 197.  The architecture introduces six instructions that offer full hardware support for AES. Four of them support high performance data encryption and decryption, and the other two instructions support the AES key expansion procedure. Let's take a look at how this feature impacts Cryptography performance.

Sandra 2009 SP2 Benchmark Scores

Results: The Intel Core i5 540 Mobile Processor with AES-NI has significantly more Cyptographic Bandwidth than the previous Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 Mobile Processor. The bandwidth in the AES256 iAES Cryptographic test was ten fold faster on the Core i5 540M processor!

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Review Index
Page 1 - Core i5 540M and ASUS K42F
Page 2 - 2010 Intel HD Graphics
Page 3 - The ASUS K42F 14-inch Notebook
Page 4 - Test Setup
Page 5 - Core i5 540M CPU-Z
Page 6 - SiSoftware Sandra 2010c
Page 7 - x264 HD Encoding
Page 8 - Sony Vegas 9.0C Pro
Page 9 - POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 34
Page 10 - Cinebench R10
Page 11 - PCMark Vantage
Page 12 - 3DMark Vantage
Page 13 - Spore - Game Testing
Page 14 - Blu-ray Video Playback
Page 15 - Power Consumption
Page 16 - Battery Life Benchmark
Page 17 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions