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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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.