The chaps over at Techwarelabs tested the Intel Pentium D 805 running at 2.66GHz with a bus speed of 533MHz and 2MB cache. The processor is EM64T enabled but has no HT. Still who would have thought that a dual core processor would be available for so little money. The reviewer was able to overclock the Pentium D 805 by a formidable 46%!

The overclocking potential of the Pentium D 805 is what impressed me the most. With minimal efffort I was able to increase the clock speed by 46%! As you can see from the charts, the increase in clock speed translated into the real world, where the overclocked 805 was faster than stock by 30%+ in the majority of tests.

For someone with a budget of less than $150 for a processor, there should be no reason to go single core or any other processor for that matter. The Pentium D 805 is clearly in a league of it's own (when overclocked) at this price point. The price of the Pentium D 805, motherboard w/SLI and 1gb of memory would come out to around the same price as an X2 3800+ processor!!! This is really the best bang for your buck, stock or overclocked. On the other hand, with the price premium of the X2 3800+, you get slightly better performance. Unfortunately, you have to decide if the extra $150 is worth a 2.5%(o/c v.s. o/c) or 16.2% (stock v.s. stock) increase in performance for applications. With Conroe and AM2 on the horizon, the 805 is a great solution to hold you off until then.