Intel Pentium D 805 - Dual Core on a Budget

Overall Performance using SYSMark 2004

In the Office Productivity suite of SYSMark 2004 you see a similar picture of the AMD/Intel rivalry to what we saw in MMCC Winstone, with the Pentium D 805 offering performance slightly faster than that of the single core Athlon 64 3000+ and Opteron 144. The Pentium D 820 really starts to show its worth here, offering an almost 7% performance advantage over the 805.

SYSMark's Internet Content Creation tests are dominated by the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, but the Pentium D 805 also does exceptionally well for its price. Here we see about a 36% increase in performance over the similarly priced Athlon 64 3000+. A major reason for the performance improvement due to dual core/Hyper-Threading in this test is because ICC SYSMark 2004 will actually trigger one of those dreaded appllication stalls when multitasking and switching between two applications. Having a Hyper-Threading enabled or dual core CPU alleviates the problem and lets things move a lot smoother. There are obviously other performance benefits to dual core, but SYSMark actually offers us a way of measuring what is normally a very unquantifiable benefit of dual core CPUs.

The overall picture in SYSMark is pretty good for the Pentium D 805: it shows the processor offering greater performance than its AMD cost-competitor, and about 93% of the performance of the Pentium D 820. Interestingly enough, SYSMark on average shows the Pentium D 805 basically equalling the performance of the single core Pentium 4 631.