Intel Pentium D 805 - Dual Core on a Budget

When Intel introduced its first line of dual core desktop processors we were all shocked at how cheap you could buy them. The Pentium D 820, running at 2.8GHz, was the first Intel processor we recommended since Intel's Northwood core. It was no surprise to anyone that Prescott was too hot and offered no real performance advantage to justify its downside when compared to AMD's Athlon 64 CPUs. With the Pentium D, Intel still had the heat problems and underwhelming performance, but for heavy multitaskers and users of multithreaded applications the performance could not be beat. The Pentium D 820 debuted at $241, putting it at about the same price as a single core Athlon 64 3500+.