Intel Pentium D 820 review

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Verdict:

The 840 Extreme Edition is incredibly fast but it's overshadowed by AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4800+, which is almost as fast and over £200 cheaper. The Pentium D 820, however, performed brilliantly in our benchmarks, but costs just £176. It's the best processor for a powerful desktop system.

Review Date: 1 Jan 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

Review
Specs

Core: Smithfield

Frequency: 2.8GHz

Socket: LGA775

Process: 90nm

Cores: Two

Instructions: MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, EM64T

Multiplier: 14x

External bus: 200MHz

Effective FSB speed: 800MHz

Level 1 cache: 16KB

Level 2 cache: 1,024KB

The Pentium D is Intel's dual-core processor, and competes with AMD's Athlon 64 X2 series. Pentium D chips will fit into many modern LGA775 motherboards, but be sure to check before you buy. Motherboards using the Intel 915 or 925 chipsets, for example, do not support dual-core processors.

The Pentium 840 Extreme Edition also uses Hyper-Threading on both cores, so Windows recognises it as four processors.

The D 820 and 840 Extreme Edition produced impressive results in both PCMark04 and the video encoding section of the Shopper benchmarks. The £176 D 820 scored 5,607 in PCMark04, just behind the £413 Pentium 4 570. Its score of 139 overall in our Shopper benchmarks was only slightly behind the 142 produced by AMD's £250 Athlon 64 X2 3800+. The Pentium 840 Extreme Edition scored 173 in the Shopper benchmark, ahead of AMD's X2 and FX-57. Its score of 241 in our video-encoding test is astonishing.

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