PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004

As we saw earlier with the X2 4200+, PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004 benefitted only marginally from the presence of a second core. In the case of the Pentium D 820, this second core has done absolutely nothing for this benchmark. Both 2.8 GHz Pentium 4s are at the bottom of the chart here.

PC Magazine Multimedia Content Creation 2004

While both the Pentium D 820 and Pentium 4 670 at 2.8 GHz place last again, we can see that the second core has garnered the 820 an additional 1.4 points, about a 5% gain. The Athlon 64 X2 4200+ takes the top spot, followed by the 2.2 GHz Venice. Our 3.6 GHz Prescott places third.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic

Originally, I chose to run this benchmark for the X2 4200+ review in order to determine the efficiency of AMD's implementation of dual cores. Quick calculations revealed to us that AMD's work resulted in a perfect 100% increase in raw arithmetic performance, and but the results I saw from the Pentium D 820 were much less impressive. While ALU performance saw about an 80% increase, FPU and SSE2 performance only increased 20% and 22% (respectively). Clearly the Pentium D implementation is providing a benefit, but it is crippled compared to AMD's "native" dual-core design.

SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth

The three Pentium 4 systems on our charts are left in the dust, in a fairly tightly-knit bundle. The two Athlon 64 systems have an average ~700 MB/s advantage over the Pentium 4s. Our dual-core 850 manages to come out 200 MB/s ahead of the 670 at 2.8 GHz, but falls about ~170 MB/s behind the 3.6 GHz Prescott, which was tested on the reference nForce 4 for Intel platform.

That concludes our synthetic and productivity testing. I can hardly say that I'm impressed with what I've seen here so far. The Pentium D 820 lags in almost every test, with the Athlon 64s coming out on top consistently. Keep in mind we're not doing direct comparisons between the two Dual Core chips due to price disparity, but it is interesting to note nonetheless. The D 820 CPU Arithmetic scores were good, but not outstanding either, especially when compared to the 670 at 2.8 GHz. I would have expected more than a ~21% increase in performance when adding a second core, but that wasn't the case.

The only sliver of hope that I saw here was the PC Magazine Multimedia Content Creation 2004 score, which gained a nice 1.4-point bump. I have a feeling that the Pentium D will be able to stretch its legs in the next two set of tests.