Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

The results here are self-explanatory. They seem to be a less-contrasted version of our Call of Duty results.

Unreal Tournament 2004

Unreal Tournament has always favoured the Athlon 64, and today is no different. The Prescott with its extreme clock speed is not enough to overcome the 2.2 GHz Athlon 64s. Trailing by 20 FPS are the Pentium D 820 and the underclocked Pentium 4 670.

X2 Rolling Demo

Once again, this looks to be pretty self-explanatory.

To summarize the game tests, I have to say that I'm disappointed, though not surprised, by the Pentium D 820's performance. Dual-core magic aside, when it comes down to games, dual core CPUs just don't see significant gains. The Pentium D 820 is really just a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 in these applications. As we saw, the Pentium 4 design needs to be clocked to at least 3.6 GHz and have 1 MB of L2 to stay competitive with the 2.2 GHz Athlon 64s with 512 KB of L2 cache. If you're a gamer, the Pentium 4 in general is not for you, let alone a relatively slow-clocked Pentium D 820. The mantra has been, and continues to be, "buy an Athlon 64 if you're a gamer".