Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 vs Pentium D 820 showdown - Introduction

The Pentium D 820 I used for this benchmark was launched back in 2005. Yup, this processor is already 2 years old. The Pentium D 820 is basicly 2 Prescott core soldered onto a single package. And because of that, the Pentium D's temperatures are rather high. The clock speed for this chip is 2.8GHz, with a 800Mhz Front Side Bus, while it has a 2MB L2 cache. TDP rating is 90W. The Pentium D is manufactured using the 90nm fabrication technology, while the newer Presler based Pentium Ds were manufactured using the 65nm fabrication tehnology.

The Core2Duo, on the other hand, was launched in July 2006. The timeframe did clash with the Pentium D, but due to the fact that the Pentium Ds were sold at dirt cheap prices, the Core2Duo had a price "disadvantage". The Core2Duo, unlike the Pentium D, which uses 2 desktop cores in a single package, actually uses the Yonah coclore found in Intel's notebook range. The Yonah core is famous for its low power consumption. All Core2Duos, except the Penryn, are manuafactured using the 65nm fabrication technology. This means that power consumption and heat output is noticably lower than the Pentium D's.

In my benchmarks, these are my hardware used.
A Core2Duo E4600 @ 2.4GHz, 800MHz FSB. And also a Pentium D 820, 2.8GHz, 800MHz FSB
2 sticks of Crucial Ballistix Tracer RAM @ 1066MHz, 1GB each

Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler.Western Digital's 500GB SATA II Hard Drive, with a 16MB cache.And finally, Gigabyte's GA-EP45-UD3L board. this board is based on Intel's P45 chipset, and supports all of Intel's current CPUs. Sans the Core i7.

All of these will be powered by a Silverstone ST400 power supply.