Pentium D 805 or Venice 3000+?

[XMan]

All things being equal, which way would you go - ?

Intel Pentium D 805 or Venice 3000+?

I'd like to overclock a bit; this will be in a Q-Pack with a mATX motherboard. I can find a few AMD boards that are reputed to be good overclockers, but I'm not coming up with a lot of Intel boards. I need a board that uses PC3200, rather than DDR2, as well. Currently looking at the P5RD1-VM, but I'm not sure how good of an overclocker's board it is.

 

[XMan]

Any input?

 

[stevty2889]

I would go with the Venice, putting an extremely hot running CPU in a small case is a bad idea, especaily if you want to overclock. My 805 is hitting 57c on water cooling at 3.7ghz, my X2 is hitting 50c at 2.618ghz on the stock AMD heatsink.

 

[XMan]

Wow, and I just looked at the game benches from the Anandtech 805 review. The 3000+ is much faster even at stock speeds.

No brainer, then. Thanks for the advice.

 

[dguy6789]

For a normal computer that is to be used for everything, the Pentium D 805>Athlon 64 3000+ any day of the week. However, you seem to have some specifics that require that recommendation to be ammended. You have stated that the machine is going to be used solely for games. This is the area where the Athlon 64 will be faster. Also, you have stated that your machine is going to be small in size. As a consequence of that small size, heat output and power consumption is going to be more of an issue that it would be otherwise. Since the Pentium D 805 generates a considerably large amount of heat and uses quite a bit more power, the Athlon 64 3000+ would seem to be a prime choice for your needs.