Intel Pentium D 805 - Dual Core on a Budget

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.