Testbed and Methods

As we have promised in the beginning of this article, Pentium D 820 will compete in our performance tests against other processors offered at the same price point. Among them are AMD Athlon 64 3200+ and 3500+, Intel Pentium 4 540 and 550 and Pentium 4 630 and 640, which are priced between $200 and $270. This test session will allow us to conclude whether it would be a good idea to base your platform particularly on the Pentium D 820 CPU.

Our platforms were assembled with the following components:

• CPUs:
• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Socket 939, 2.2GHz, 512KB L2, E3 core revision aka Venice);
• AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Socket 939, 2.0GHz, 512KB L2, E3 core revision aka Venice);
• Intel Pentium D 820 (LGA775, 2.8GHz, 2 x 1MB L2);
• Intel Pentium 4 640 (LGA775, 3.2GHz, 2MB L2);
• Intel Pentium 4 630 (LGA775, 3.0GHz, 2MB L2);
• Intel Pentium 4 570 (LGA775, 3.4GHz, 1MB L2);
• Intel Pentium 4 570 (LGA775, 3.2GHz, 1MB L2).
• Mainboards:
• ASUS P5WD2 Premium (LGA775, Intel 955X);
• DFI NF4 Ultra-D (Socket 939, NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra).
• Memory:
• 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO, 2 x 512MB, 2-2-2-10);
• 1024MB DDR2-667 SDRAM (Corsair CM2X512A-5400UL, 2 x 512MB, 4-4-4-14).
• PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (PCI-E x16) graphics card.
• Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150) HDD.
• Microsoft Windows XP SP2 OS.