The Intel Pentium D 820….. Dual Core for the masses

Multitask Testing

I chose a few types of programs to use here. I decided against using any type of program that assigns threads, as the typical user just wants to fire up programs and start on their business, allowing the computer itself to assign tasks.

Test #1

By now we are all familiar with the story, and problem of playing a FPS, and having another scheduled task kick in, such as an anti-virus program. For the first test I chose to simply run the Doom 3 timedemo benchmark while running a virus scan in the background.

Test #2

for the second test, i again ran the Doom 3 benchmark, but this time I simply added http://www.legitreviews.com/article.php?aid=78 and an Anti-Virus scan. F2H has become a huge part of our community, and although it takes up very little resoruces while running, i have had problems in the past while trying to play games.

For some limited benchmarking, the Pentium D 820 did very well. I also think that once this technology is refined, and more programs are optimized to use dual core technology, that we will see a much more dramatic performance gain.

From a simple price aspect, the 820 is a great choice. I’d really like to revisit this Pentium D line again once I get my hands on an AMD X2 processor.