Pentium D 805 Overclocking

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, March 30, 2006, 03:10 PM EDT

Hey everyone. I've been playing with one of Intel's Pentium D 805 processors for most of this morning, and have some interesting news to report. If you're unfamiliar with the Pentium D 805, it's basically a cheap, dual-core CPU based on Intel's 90nm Smithfield core. What separates the Pentium D 805 from most of its Smithfield-based counterparts, is that the 805 rides on a 533MHz FSB. And it's also the lowest clocked dual-core desktop processor available from Intel at the moment at 2.66GHz.

This, of course, makes the Pentium D 805 a potential candidate for overclockers on a budget looking to jump on the dual-core bandwagon. How good of a candidate was a question I had up until a few hours ago...

2.66GHz Pentium D 805 @ 4.05GHz

As you can see, we were able to take our Pentium D 805 up from its default clock speed of 2.66GHz, all the way to a tasty 4.05GHz -- an increase of almost 1400MHz, or about 52%. We achieved these results with a Corsair Nautilus 500 water-cooling kit, some Corsair RAM, and an Asus P5WDG2-WS 975X Express based motherboard. Not too bad for a ~$130 CPU.

Tags: Overclocking, overclock, Lock, clock, ium, KIN, Pentium, pen, King, K

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com