Testbed and Methods

During our test session for the Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930 we tried to attain two goals. Firstly, we had to find out how fast the best-value dual-core Intel processors could be compared with the youngest AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+. Secondly, we wanted to see how fast the overclocked Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930 could go. In this case we decided to compare the per5formance of our today’s heroes against that of the today’s fastest dual-core AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 processor. Note that since the youngest dual-core AMD processors with two cores overclock up to 2.6GHz on average, the performance level demonstrated by Athlon 64 FX-60 can easily be regarded as the performance of the overclocked Athlon 64 X2. In other words, by comparing the overclocked Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930 processors against Athlon 64 FX-60 we could actually answer the question: what dual-core CPUs boast best performance results during overclocking.

So, we assembled a few test platforms from the following components:

• CPU:
  • AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (Socket 939, 2.6GHz, 2x1024KB L2 cache, E4 core revision – Toledo);
  • AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Socket 939, 2.0GHz, 2x512KB L2 cache, E6 core revision – Manchester);
  • 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).
• HDD: Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150).
• OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

The tests were run with the BIOS settings adjusted for the maximum performance.

Note that during Pentium D overclocking we set the memory frequency close to 667MHz. So, if the Pentium D 920 was working at 3.92GHz, the DDR2 memory ran at 700MHz, and in the system with Pentium D 930 overclocked to 4.0GHz, the DDR2 SDRAM worked at 668MHz.