The new system

I've had my new system for almost a month now, and I can honestly say it destroys my previous Pentium D 805 system in every aspect. I decided to go ahead and spend a little extra on this system, and in the end I am quite happy with what I got.

AMD Athlon X2 Brisbane 4400 $85
Biostar TF7025-M2 $70
2 gb of Patriot High Performance DDR2 800 memory $60 after rebate
Athenatech Micro-atx case with 270 watt Sparkle power supply $65
Samsung DVD-RW $30

All in all, I spent around $300 for everything. Not too shabby. I used the Samsung 200gb SATA hard drive and wireless card from my old system. I didn't have to worry about a graphics card because the Biostar TF7025-M2 has integrated Geforce 7025 graphics, which surprisngly weren't all that bad.

In stock configuration for being a budget PC, the system simply rocks. It scores a 2463 in Geekbench under Windows XP. With a slight overclock, the system is able to score a 2714.

In SuperPi, the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Brisbane core caculates pi to a million digits in 40 seconds. Of course, the program doesn't take advantage of the two cores.

In Windows Vista, the system scores very high in CPU, memory, and hard drive. The onboard graphics hold the system back, but not as bad as one may think. It scores a 3.3 base score. The onboard graphics (Geforce 7025) actually score the same as a Geforce 7300 GS PCI Express card, so guess I'm stuck with a 3.3 in Vista's rating system.

More about the system, including component reviews later...

My last hoorah with the Pentium D 805

It's been a month or so since I updated this blog, and truth be told, I forgot about it. A lot has changed however in the past month. I ordered a new setup from Newegg, and now I have a pretty sweet system. (AMD Athlon X2 4400, 2 gb DDr2 800 RAM, nForce 7025 / 630a motherboard.. more on that later)

After I assembled my new system, I took my old Pentium D 805 and motherboard and put it in a old tower case I had lying around. I hooked a 40 gb PATA hard drive to it, installed a copy of Mac OS X (JaS 10.8 release) and messed around with OS X.

I used GeekBench to get scores of roughly 1600 in Windows XP with the Pentium D 805 at stock speed. After installing OS X, I decided to try GeekBench for OS X and see how it would score.

I wish I would have taken screenshots, but I guess I will just have to link to the Geekbench results.

I am so fucking amazed at the difference in scores, that I now see why a lot of people are brainwashed into still buying Pentium D processors. I mean, I get a score of 1500 in Windows Vista with the Pentium D 805 running at 2.66 ghz. For some unknown reason, the same chip gets a score of 1949 in OS X!

Curiousity finally got the best of me, and I ended up overclocking my Pentium D processor. I wasn't going to be using the system very long, so I wasn't worried about the increase in electricity, and the potential damage to my hardware.

I'm not going to bore anyone with the overclocking details, so I will keep 'em short.l. Since I was using a cheap ass PC CHIPS motherboard, I wasn't expecting much. To make a long story short, the maximum I could get the board upto was 3.33 ghz. Which isn't too bad, considering its a shitty motherboard and I was able to get a 25% speed increase.

Of course, running @ 3.33 ghz gave me a few problems. First off, I had to use a AGP graphics card (onboard video wouldn't work) and the onboard sound didn't work. I didn't have to worry about case temperature because the board was just laying in an open tower case (it was still around 60 degrees centigrade at idle.).

I booted the Pentium D 805 running at 3.33 ghz into OS X and quickly ran Geekbench. I was able to get a score of 2432; almost a 1000 higher than my Windows XP score at stock speed.

What did I learn? I learned that Geekbench on OS X gives fairytale scores when compared to the same hardware in Windows XP.

Did this change my mind about the Pentium D 805? No fucking way.

If anything it made me wonder why there are actually stupid people out there that sit around and talk about how great the processor is. (This guy swears by the Pentium D 805 processor, even stating that a machine built around one is better than a Mac Pro) Sure, I overclocked the processor, but the thing runs hot enough at stock speed. And besides, even though I got a 25% increase in speed, the thing still gets murdered by any other dual core processor line (Athlon X2, Core 2, etc).

So what did I end up doing with the Pentium D and motherboard? I was actually able to sell it on eBay for $100; the same price I paid for the motherboard / CPU on March 8th, 2007 from NewEgg. Good riddance, Pentium D.