Intel Pentium D 805 - Dual Core on a Budget

Gaming Performance using F.E.A.R. and Quake 4

F.E.A.R. shows the Pentium D 805 and the rest of the Intel crowd falling to the bottom of the chart. The Athlon 64 3000+ enjoys its largest margin of victory here, offering a 15% advantage over the Pentium D 805.

We included Quake 4 with its new 1.1 patch because the patch enables SMP support; SMP was enabled on both Hyper-Threading and dual core CPUs, which is why you see them outperforming their single-core counterparts. If more games took advantage of SMP in the same manner as Quake 4, the Pentium D 805 would be a fairly strong gaming CPU. In reality, there are only two current PC games offering SMP support: Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2, and the former benefits much more than the latter.