Testbed and Methods

We will compare the performance of AMD Opteron 165 as a desktop platform against that of other relatively affordable dual-core solutions. So, today’s race will include the following participants: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and Intel Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930. I would like to stress that Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930 are the new solutions from the microprocessor giant that are based on the 65nm Presler core and differ from their predecessors by larger L2 cache memory, which has been increased to 4MB (2MB per core).

During our test session we assembled a few systems with the following hardware components:

• CPUs:
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Socket 939, 2.0GHz, 2x512KB L2 cache, E6 core revision – Manchester);
• AMD Opteron 165 (Socket 939, 1.8GHz, 2x1024KB L2 cache, E6 core revision – Toledo);
• Intel Pentium D 930 (LGA775, 3.0GHz, 2x2MB L2, Presler);
• Intel Pentium D 920 (LGA775, 2.8GHz, 2x2MB L2, Presler).
• Mainboards:
• DFI LANParty UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI);
• ASUS P5WD2-E Premium (LGA775, Intel 975X Express).
• Memory:
• 2048MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX1024-3500LLPRO, 2 x 1024 MB, 2-3-2-10);
• 2048MB DDR2-667 SDRAM (Corsair CM2X1024-6400PRO, 2 x 1024 MB, 4-4-4-12).
• Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB (PCI-E x16).
• Storage subsystem: Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150).
• Operating system: Microsoft Windows XP SP2 с DirectX 9.0c.

The BIOS Setup of the mainboards was adjusted for maximum performance.