Pentium D 2.8Ghz

Esparko2

Junior Member
Jan 13, 2008
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I'm buying my friend's computer and he has a Pentium D running at 2.8 GHz.

Is it good for gaming now or should I look into an upgrade to a Core 2 Duo?

He ran Crysis on it pretty decently among other things.
 

WildW

Senior member
Oct 3, 2008
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evilpicard.com
Hard to say without knowing what else is in that computer - e.g. what graphics card? It is very likely that any vaguely modern graphics card will be horribly CPU limited by it.

I got a huge improvement in performance going from a 3.4 GHz Pentium D to a cheap, lowly 2.5GHz E5200 Core2Duo. If I remember right, Unreal Tournament 3 doubled its old framerate.
 
Apr 20, 2008
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If it is $75 or less for the whole setups, then go for it.

Any more and you are tossing your money away.
 

Gikaseixas

Platinum Member
Jul 1, 2004
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how much is he charging you? I don't wanna think what kind of graphics card he has on it. I wouldn't do it, spend your money on a cheap mobo and dual core cpu combo instead.
 

Denithor

Diamond Member
Apr 11, 2004
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The Pentium D processors are not gaming chips by today's standards (in fact, they were pretty lousy even when they were Intel's best offering). Just look at these benchmarks (page 1, page 2) to see that the slowest Core 2 Duo (original e6300, 1.86GHz, 2MB cache) beats out the fastest Pentium D processor ever created (Pentium D XE 965, 3.73GHz, 2x2MB cache) in four of the five benchmarks run, severely in several cases. Looking at specs the PentiumD 965 is exactly twice the speed & cache of the e6300. And still manages such miserable performance that people simply quit benchmarking the Pentium D chips very shortly after Core 2 was launched.

I wouldn't spend any more on that system than the case and possibly video card are worth. It's gotta be several years old so I would even be hesitant to use the PSU in a rebuild.
 

dust

Golden Member
Oct 13, 2008
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I got a Pentium D @ 3Ghz, paired with a 7800GT and it feels sooo slow. I can run Crysis at minimum settings only and still it lags. You shouldn't bother with it if you're gaming.
 

Stoneburner

Diamond Member
May 29, 2003
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If I recall correctly, the pentium D's actually were a step back in gaming from the Pentium C's.
 

dguy6789

Diamond Member
Dec 9, 2002
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Originally posted by: Stoneburner
If I recall correctly, the pentium D's actually were a step back in gaming from the Pentium C's.

Pentium D 800 series were two Prescotts and Pentium D 900 series were cooler and had twice the level 2 cache. Northwood was 0-5% faster than the Prescott usually and sometimes slower.

People need to take into account that although it's just a Pentium 4, it's still a dual core. It should be close to 100% faster in modern games than a regular Pentium 4. Back when benchmarks were ran on this processor, games were not multi threaded.

The Pentium D 820 isn't a high end processor by any means, it's low end, but it is still good enough to do gaming if you have a solid graphics card. It's a little bit slower than the Athlon 64 X2 3800+. It's probably about as fast as the current Celeron E1200(1.6Ghz dual core, 512k shared l2 cache) which is fast enough to play just about all of the modern games, just not perfectly fluidly like a high end processor.(I know because I have one with 2GB of ram and an HD 4670. It plays games just fine)

I wouldn't pay much for a system with an 820 now due to how insanely good the prices are on good processors right now, but it's far from worthless.
 

Stumps

Diamond Member
Jun 18, 2001
7,125
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ahhh the old 820...I still have one of those in an old rig running at 3.6ghz, if it wasn't for the 2900XT that resides in the same system it would be pretty much useless for gaming.

In most games a Pentium D is no better than a similar clocked P4...at least they can multitask slighty better than a P4.
 

evolucion8

Platinum Member
Jun 17, 2005
2,867
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The Pentium D main issue is that it doesn't support HT, most of it's execution pipelines idles most of the time, specially in games. In recent reviews, even a Pentium Dual Core E2160 at stock can bottleneck in many gaming scenarios a HD 4870, and is a CPU which is considerably faster than any Pentium D. If you can get it for less than 60 bucks, isn't a bad idea, but bear in mind that for a little more than $70 you can get a decent dual core CPU from Intel or AMD which is much faster. Pentium D is a joke back then, and is a joke today. My old single core Pentium M at 2.70GHz smoked alive a gaming setup using the same video card with a Pentium D at 3.20GHz in all games, multi threaded and not multi threaded.