Intel Pentium D 805 - Dual Core on a Budget
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 7, 2006 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Power Consumption
As always, we measured power consumption of the entire system at the wall outlet. First up is power consumption with the test system at idle. Here AMD's Cool 'n Quiet and Intel's EIST really come into play and do their best to reduce power consumption:
As you can expect, based on the old 90nm Smithfield core, the Pentium D 805 isn't exactly the coolest running chip on the block. In fact, the Athlon 64 3000+ consumes less power under full load than the Pentium D 805 does with both of its cores idling. Note that the higher power consumption on the two Opteron parts is because Cool 'n Quiet would not work with the Opterons on our test platform.
The picture doesn't get any prettier under full load. If you're expecting the Pentium D 805 to be a cool running, quiet chip, you're going to be sorely disappointed. If power consumption matters to you then you're far better off with a Pentium D 900 series or an Athlon 64 X2.
Looking at the long-term prospects, power costs money, so how long will it be before the lower power X2 3800+ reaches the break-even point? If we go with a typical $.10 per kWHr, the X2 3800+ consumes 37W less at idle and 48W less at full load. If that seems like a lot of power initially, it actually only works out to $32-$42 per year, running both systems 24/7. That means you're looking at a minimum of four years to reach equivalence in price+power. What about the 920 versus 805 power costs? The difference there is even less in terms of power use, so even at full load you're looking at $16 per year, or seven years to reach the break-even point.
Of course, you can't just look at power in most instances. The X2 3800+ will offer you faster performance during its lifetime, so it definitely warrants consideration. Lower power, lower heat, lower noise, and higher performance are all nice things to have.
Note: Pentium D 820 numbers were excluded from the power comparison due to technical difficulties with our test platform at the last minute. Based on the data here, you can expect it to consume more power than the Pentium D 805.
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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.