Processors:
AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+
(overclocked up to 2.7GHz)
Intel Pentium D
820 (overclocked up to 4.2GHz)
Motherboards:
Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI
Gigabyte 8I955X Royal
Memory:
2 x 1GB Corsair XMS
PC3200 CAS2 Module 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS PC2-6400 CAS4 Module
Cooling: Corsair COOL Water Cooling Kit
Hard Drive: Maxtor 250GB 7200RPM SATA
Graphics Card: ASUS Radeon X850XT PE
256MB PCIe
OS: Windows XP Pro SP2
The Athlon 64 X2 4400+ is default
clocked at 2.2GHz and features a 2MB L2 Cache, 1MB per core.
The Pentium D 820 is clocked slightly higher at 2.8GHz and
also features a 2MB L2 Cache. However, this aside neither
processor is remotely alike as both AMD and Intel use
completely different designs.
The Athlon 64 X2 4400+ was
overclocked to 2.7GHz (11x locked multiplier). The
Pentium D 820 was overclocked to an impressive
frequency of 4.2GHz, using a 300MHz FSB (14x
multiplier), making it 1.5GHz faster than the Athlon X2. If you wish to know more details on how
we configured our BIOS for the Pentium D overclocking, read
this page.
The overclocking results we are showing
for both of these processors are what I would expect an
average D 820 or X2 4400+ processor could achieve using a
decent water-cooling solution (here we used Corsair’s COOL
Water Cooling Kit).
In the case of the Athlon X2 4400+ high
quality air-cooling may also suffice for successful 2.7GHz
overclocking. The X2 is not a processor known for generating
overwhelming amounts of heat, something that can not be said
about the Pentium D, and pretty much any Pentium 4 Prescott
core successors.
Memory Benchmarks
(for all tests, a higher score is better)
The SiSoft2005 memory results indicate
that the Intel Pentium D 820 has roughly 22% more memory
bandwidth at its disposal when compared to the AMD Athlon64
X2 4400+. The PCmark2005 Pro results also indicate that the
Pentium D 820 delivers the bigger memory bandwidth. The read
results show a 15% performance advantage favoring the Intel
system and a 2% gain for the write test. The MemTach results
strongly favor the Intel system, showing an 84% performance
advantage in the Analyze 2 test.
