Pentium D 820 and i945G/P Chipset Showcase
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for the following tests, we first entered their system BIOS for each board and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the rest of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
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| SYSTEM 1: Pentium D 820 at 2.8GHz Pentium 4 630 at 3GHz Pentium 4 530J at 3GHz Intel D945GTPLR system board (Intel 945G Chipset) 2x512MB PQI24200 Turbo Memory DDR2-533 CL 3-3-3-8 Radeon X800 Pro On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD 80GB HD 7200 RPM IDE Windows XP Pro SP2 DirectX 9.0c Intel Chipset Drivers v7.0.0.1019 Intel Graphics Drivers v14.12.0.4229 ATI Catalyst 5.5
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SYSTEM 2: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2GHz) MSI K8N Neo Platinum (NVIDIA nForce 3 250GB) 2x512MB PQI3200-1024DBU CL 2-2-2-5 Radeon X800 Pro On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD 80GB HD 7200 RPM IDE Windows XP Pro SP2 DirectX 9.0c nForce 3 Unified Drivers v5.1 ATI Catalyst 5.5 |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran the four most common modules with the Pentium D and 945G motherboard test bed.
;) CPU Benchmark Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz) |
;) Multimedia Benchmark Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz) |
;) CPU Cache Benchmark Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz) |
;) Memory Benchmark Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz) |
The Pentium D 820's CPU arithmetic score was the best all-around result when comparing the results with the three highest references in SANDRA's database. Floating point testing was second best to the two Pentium 4 Extreme Edition comparison chips, who benefited from a larger dedicated L2 cache complement. With the Multimedia Benchmark, the Pentium D 820 topped the charts, taking a firm lead over all others. Cache and Memory scores were in line with what we would have expected in this test scenario, with an 800MHz FSB and DDR2-533 DRAM.
Next we'll continue our synthetic testing with FutureMark's PCMark04, focusing further on CPU and Memory performance. Moving forward, all of our testing will be accompanied by results of the same test bed with a Pentium 4 630 and a Pentium 4 530J, both of which are clocked at 3GHz. We've also included scores from an Athlon 64 3200+ test bed, configured as similarly as possible, for an additional reference point.
