The Pentium D: Intel's Dual Core Silver Bullet Previewed

Pentium D Processor 840

The Pentium D certainly is Intel's top product for this year. While the 2.8 and 3.0 GHz versions will be quite affordable at their expected $241 and $316 price points, a whopping $530 for the 3.2 GHz model is clearly too high given the small clock speed increments and the resulting miniscule performance benefits over the slightly slower models.

We used a 945G motherboard in our second test system.

CPU-Z is not yet able to detect both L2 caches. We took this screenshot while overclocking the Pentium Extreme Edition to 4 GHz.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.