| Dual Core on a Budget |
|
|
Some of you must be wondering why I didn’t use an Intel equivalent to the X2 3800+. Well, we all know how that would turn out. The main point of this article is not to compare apples to apples. I wanted to know how Intel’s cheapest dual core solution fairs against AMD’s cheapest dual core solution. The tables have turned. For the first time, Intel’s offerings are much more economical than AMD’s. Sure you get a performance hit (depending on how you look at it), but you get to keep some extra money in your pocket.
This processor is a paradox. I was completely disappointed and impressed. Although I wasn’t expecting some kind of miracle at stock speeds, I hoped it would have won more or come closer in real world testing when overclocked. On the other hand, I keep expecting it to perform like a $1000 chip when it’s not. And there is the bottom line. It did perform like a $1000 chip. I’m not one to speculate, but, I’m fairly confident that (when overclocked) it would have dominated the Pentium 840 EE. However, this was not the case with AMD. The overclocked X2 performed like the superstar that it is, dominating the overclocked 805. If you look at it from another perspective, the overclocked 805 dominates the stock X2 3800+ in real world testing and synthetics. I don’t know about you, but I think that is impressive coming from a $135 (street price) chip.
The overclocking potential of the Pentium D 805 is what impressed me the most. With minimal efffort I was able to increase the clock speed by 46%! As you can see from the charts, the increase in clock speed translated into the real world, where the overclocked 805 was faster than stock by 30%+ in the majority of tests.
For someone with a budget of less than $150 for a processor, there should be no reason to go single core or any other processor for that matter. The Pentium D 805 is clearly in a league of it's own (when overclocked) at this price point. The price of the Pentium D 805, motherboard w/SLI and 1gb of memory would come out to around the same price as an X2 3800+ processor!!! This is really the best bang for your buck, stock or overclocked. On the other hand, with the price premium of the X2 3800+, you get slightly better performance. Unfortunately, you have to decide if the extra $150 is worth a 2.5%(o/c v.s. o/c) or 16.2% (stock v.s. stock) increase in performance for applications. With Conroe and AM2 on the horizon, the 805 is a great solution to hold you off until then.
| « Benchmarking | More Articles » |