The Core i3-530 and the Athlon II 640 proved to have around the same overall performance level, making the decision of which CPU to buy purely a decision of which brand you like the most, if you are an average user.
However, there were some specific scenarios that deserve reconsideration of the above statement. If you run professional applications that can recognize and use more than two CPU cores, the Athlon II X4 640 is a better option. Even though the Core i3-530 can simulate two extra cores through the use of the Hyper-Threading technology, CPU-intensive programs will run faster on CPUs with “real” cores: the Athlon II X4 640 crushed the Core i3-530 in 3D rendering (36% faster on Cinebench) and provided a pretty decent advantage on DivX conversion (14% faster on VirtualDub using DivX codec).
On the other hand, the integrated video present in the Core i3-530 processor was much faster than the integrated video provided by the AMD 890GX chipset, 41% on Call of Duty 4. But don’t get excited: with only 19 frames per second with all image quality settings configured at their lowest values, it will be very unlikely that you will play games with the integrated video available in this processor (or, let’s be honest, with any kind of integrated video). But on FarCry 2, both integrated video solutions achieved the same performance level.
Playing these games using a real video card (we used a Radeon HD 5670) gave a tiny advantage to the Core i3-530, but with only a four-percent performance difference between the two benchmarked CPUs, we are more inclined to say that both achieved the same performance level.
