Trouble Free Operation At 3.60 GHz
Now, we're slowly working our way into the interesting clock rates, and finally exceeding the performance of the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 CPU, which operates at 3.2 GHz. This CPU costs a little over $1,000 at retail, so we've saved about $870 by using a Pentium D 805 instead. We still require no additional voltage boost at this speed, and the CPU remains stable in performing our benchmarks.
At retail computer outlets, a Pentium EE 840 goes for something north of $1,000.
Naturally, the EE 840 runs with an FSB clock rate that's 20 MHz higher and also offers Hyper Threading. The Pentium D 805 is running at a CPU clock rate that's 200 MHz faster, however, so it has no trouble keeping up.
Overclocking the FSB clock rate to 180 MHz improves memory performance. The highest memory clock at our disposal is 360 MHz, because a maximum memory multiplier of 4.0 translates into DDR2-720. Thus, we improved memory performance by 35 percent, as company to the original memory clock rate.
Now we observe a noticeable increase in power consumption for the entire system. In idle mode, energy use climbs by 33 W; we also measured 204 W of power consumption from the power supply. Under heavy load, power consumption increases by a hefty 101 W. In considering the fact that about 80 percent of this 101 W goes to the CPU, we observe that energy consumption at 3.6 GHz has doubled to 160 W. We find ourselves here running at nearly 30 W above the maximum power class for dual core processors based on this CPU core, according to Intel's specifications.
