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

By Patrick Schmid
published

Pentium D Processor 840

We obtained a Pentium D Processor 840 for comparison reasons.

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
2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • DaveF1953
    How much can the Extreme Edition be had for now? $40? Sounds like a deal to me. Although, older, hotter, and slower in the long run. Best bet now. No?
    Reply
  • wild9
    I'd just go AMD or Core 2, the former having a much lower power draw and great overclocking potential than what you have here. My relative used to run Intel Extreme Editions like this, and the power draw was immense, he had to use water cooling. In the end he ditched it and got AMD. Not trying to say one is better than the other all the time (ie for media encoding the Intel was great), just some ideas to consider. Cheap dual-core AMD's based on AM2 are hard to beat at the moment.
    Reply