Intel Pentium D 805 - Dual Core on a Budget
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 7, 2006 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
Note that this article didn't look at the overclocking aspects of the Pentium D 805. We are working on a separate article that will look at exactly what you can expect to extract from the Pentium D 805 in terms of maximum performance should you decide to go with it.
Just as you'd expect, the Pentium D 805 is a very good value if you are either: 1) multitasking, or 2) running multithreaded applications. As we've seen by its performance in Internet Content Creation SYSMark, 3dsmax and our suite of media encoding applications, if you're running the right apps and workloads then the Pentium D 805 offers an unstoppable value. The chip ends up delivering much better overall performance at the price of a single core CPU.
The 805 also does a good job of staying competitive with the Pentium D 820 and 920. In most cases, the 805 offers within 5% of the performance of the Pentium D 820 despite its lower clock speed and 533MHz FSB. For the budget conscious, or if you're planning another more serious upgrade later this year to Socket-AM2 or Conroe, a Pentium D 805 coupled with a cheap 945 motherboard can't be beat.
The fact of the matter is that Socket-AM2 is just around the corner, and Conroe appears to be the Intel chip to wait for, so if you're upgrading or buying today we'd strongly recommend going with a more economical system upgrade. At $133, the Pentium D 805 is a very good balance between price and performance, provided that your workload is multithreaded or multitasking in nature.
Gamers looking for a temporary upgrade should honestly look to the Athlon 64 3000+ instead, as very few games have boarded the dual train as of now.
At the higher end of these value offerings, the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ continues to be a tremendous performer with a relatively low price tag. If you can afford the approximately $300 entry fee, the X2 3800+ will truly impress you across the board. Interestingly enough, we found that for the most part the Opteron 165 just isn't worth it compared to the Athlon 64 X2 3800+. Thanks to AMD's on-die memory controller, the higher clock speed of the 3800+ is more useful than the larger L2 cache of the Opteron 165. (Overclocking makes things a bit more interesting, naturally.)
So there you have it, if you are a multitasker or run multithreaded applications, and you want a great low cost solution, then the Pentium D 805 makes a wonderful stepping stone to a future AM2 or Conroe platform. If you're a gamer that doesn't care about multitasking while gaming, the Athlon 64 3000+ is still a strong value. And finally, if you've got the budget for it, the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ still can't be beat.
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peternelson - Sunday, April 9, 2006 - link
Thanks Jack, that PCN was exactly what I needed.
I had previously looked through the Intel site but not found it myself.
Given that the physical changes were only "add 10 resistors and 2 capacitors", I wonder whether Gigabyte, Asus etc al will be modding their 975 board. Heard rumours about Asus but that their new ones won't be shipping until July? No news on Gigabyte.
Viditor - Sunday, April 9, 2006 - link
Great info...thanks Jack!xxtypersxx - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
Well I am running an opteron 165 @2.6 ghz on a 1.45vcore, and I'd say its definately worth it. And that information is blatantly wrong, as the 3800+ runs at 1.8ghz stock, same as the 165
JarredWalton - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
No, the X2 4200+ is a 2.2 GHz 512K part, the 3800+ is a 2.0 GHz 512K part, and the Opteron 170 is also a 2.0 GHz part but with 1024K. The 165 is definitely 200 MHz slower than the X2 3800+. Now, as for your quote, finish the paragraph:(Overclocking makes things a bit more interesting, naturally.)
This is not an overclocking article, and if you're not going to overclock then there is absolutely no reason to spend $20 more for the Opteron 165 only to get slightly slower performance. The added cache gives a 3-5% performance boost at the same clock speed; the added 200 MHz accounts for an 11% performance boost in CPU power. It's not too difficult to see which is larger.
That said, I have two X2 3800+ chips and an Opteron 165. The X2 chips hit 2.60 GHz, and the Opteron 165 hits about the same speed. The retail Opteron HSF is definitely better, but for serious overclocking you'd probably want to spend another $50 on an aftermarket HSF anyway. Is the Opteron 165 a bad purchase? No. It's also not the greatest thing ever to hit the planet. If I were to rate the X2 3800+ vs. the Opty 165, I have to call it a tie. Both are great chips, both overclock well, and both reach very near the same final performance levels in my experience.
Kougar - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
I've really been wanting a good definite article on ALL of these proccessors! Thank you very much! This is so handy to have as a reference when people want to know what to go with for what application/purpose. I am very much looking forward to that overclocking article, it'd be very neat to see all of these processors in it ;) Can finally see how much of the hype about Opterons is grounded in fact!When prices on both the 800 and 900 series plummet to next to NOTHING within several months for Conroe (http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=1619">LINK), this will be handy to know. Hopefully AMD will focus on fully converting over to 300mm and 65nm processes quickly to help lower their marginal costs and therefore their own retail prices.
I did think it was rather sad to see the day when a Celeron D was fairly competetive or outright winning against a Athlon 64 3000+ though, excluding games... Guess that was just me!
artifex - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
Please include Mersenne Prime and/or distributed.net keycracking in your testing suite :)No, seriously, each has short benchmarks to run. And these "temporary" machines will need something to do after we all upgrade again in a few months.
Googer - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
I thought Conroe was going to run only on a 975 Chipset and early chipsets produced by Intel has a design mistake that needed to be reivised. So early spec 975 motherboards were indended to run conroe but will not, you will need a revion 2 board/chipset.
JarredWalton - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
We're not saying you can upgrade from 805 to Conroe with the same motherboard. We're saying that for about $230 you can get a reasonable socket 775 motherboard and a PD 805 and it should handle all of your multithreaded computing needs until the AM2/Conroe launches.975X support for Conroe is still a bit unknown - I'm not sure if early 975X boards will work, and I don't even know that all current 975X boards will work. 945 *won't* work as far as I know, as 965 will be the "value" platform for Conroe processors.
hoppa - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
I was very tempted until I saw those power ratings.... yikes.kyparrish - Friday, April 7, 2006 - link
This is the kind of article we all love reading, one that's well-detailed and concise.