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.

Test System Specifications "Intel & AMD Inside!"

Preliminary Benchmarks with SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing

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.