Intel Pentium D 805 - Dual Core on a Budget
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 7, 2006 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Overall Performance using SYSMark 2004
In the Office Productivity suite of SYSMark 2004 you see a similar picture of the AMD/Intel rivalry to what we saw in MMCC Winstone, with the Pentium D 805 offering performance slightly faster than that of the single core Athlon 64 3000+ and Opteron 144. The Pentium D 820 really starts to show its worth here, offering an almost 7% performance advantage over the 805.
SYSMark's Internet Content Creation tests are dominated by the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, but the Pentium D 805 also does exceptionally well for its price. Here we see about a 36% increase in performance over the similarly priced Athlon 64 3000+. A major reason for the performance improvement due to dual core/Hyper-Threading in this test is because ICC SYSMark 2004 will actually trigger one of those dreaded appllication stalls when multitasking and switching between two applications. Having a Hyper-Threading enabled or dual core CPU alleviates the problem and lets things move a lot smoother. There are obviously other performance benefits to dual core, but SYSMark actually offers us a way of measuring what is normally a very unquantifiable benefit of dual core CPUs.
The overall picture in SYSMark is pretty good for the Pentium D 805: it shows the processor offering greater performance than its AMD cost-competitor, and about 93% of the performance of the Pentium D 820. Interestingly enough, SYSMark on average shows the Pentium D 805 basically equalling the performance of the single core Pentium 4 631.
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Briggsy - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
Whilst any new system I build will have 'be quiet, dammit' as one of the core requirements, this processor seems to be good value, if only because it is so cheap for what it is, and that it surely will overclock by 25% to catch up with the 3800+ in performance (although the 3800+ can overclock to leave it in the dust, heh).Of course here in the UK power prices aren't 10c/kwh except overnight on economy power plans, so the value does start to look quite poor if you're into buying systems to last 3 years.
Remedyy - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
One article I'm looking forward to, if Anand could is webserver test. A test showing how it performs in server work over a socket 939 or IT looking to upgrade from Dual socket 370 Pentium-III's or Dual Socket A Athlon MP's maybe curious about how this Pentium-D 805 may or may not be an improvement over their previous box being hosted. The TCO is so low, but is the performance there in SQL or other front end entry level work?Asus & Supermicro make many entry level Server boards based on the Socket 775 that are ready to run with a chip like the 805.
Maybe Jarred can answer that? :)
Woodchuck2000 - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
Bought it a couple of weeks ago, bundled with a cheap 'n' nasty motherboard for £125 - bargain!Runs very quickly compared with my old Sempron 2600+, overclocks happily to 3.32GHz (667FSB) on air with no v-core increase. Given the incredibly cheap motherboard and stock cooling, when I upgrade my motherboard and cooling in a few months' time, I won't be surprised if it hits 3.6Ghz without too much hassle...
kierandill - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
Likewise; mine arrived last Thursday along with a Gigabyte motherboard from NewEgg. By that evening I had it running stably in Windows XP at a 40% overclock (3.72HGz) with stock (Intel retail box) heatsink/fan and no vCore increase. Idles in the 42C range. Amazing. I never got my Athlon XP more than about 15% on simple air cooling.I don't have any of the bencmarks from this article so I can't say how it compares to these exactly, but it is up in the AMD 64 X2 4400+ neighborhood on the non-3D benches I do have. Only real 3D bench I have is Q3 timedemo, and most sites use something else. FYI I get ~271fps on timedemo1 @1280x1024 with an Ati X700Pro PCIex.
Furen - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
Care to share the motherboard brand? Fry's is bundling this chip with an ECS mobo for $150 and I'm mighty tempted to build yet another PC if it'll be dirt cheap...poohbear - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
actually there are currently 3 games that provide support for dualcores, Quake 4, COD2, and the newly released Oblivion. it'd be nice to see some tests on Oblivion to see how much it benefits from dual core cpus (especially when doing some of the .ini tweaks for dual cores that reportedly provide a big boost in performance).nordhus - Sunday, April 9, 2006 - link
4 games, City of Heroes/City of Villains also supports dualcores.JarredWalton - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
Is there some special step to enable SMP support in Oblivion? If there is, I haven't heard about it yet and I'm apparently missing out on vastly improved performance!As it stands, I've been playing a lot of Oblivion, and I'll be damned if it's actually using both cores in anything resembling an efficient manner. Performance of the two cores together never breaks 100% (out of 200%), which is indicative of single-threaded performance. Windows may be executing gaming instructions on both cores, but the game appears to be as single core as Doom 3, Far Cry, BF2, etc.
poohbear - Saturday, April 8, 2006 - link
yep go to the ini file and change these settings:http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showt...">http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showt...
all the increases have mostly been on dual core cpus. cheers.
JarredWalton - Sunday, April 9, 2006 - link
Nothing like a game that supports dual cores, but only if you know how to properly hacked the INI file. There seem to be quite a few other hidden options for Oblivion in the INI files as well. I haven't had a chance to actually run benchmarks with the SMP hacks enabled, but that will be coming soon enough.