Intel Pentium 4 670 & Pentium D 820

Multi-Tasking Performance:

please check the notes at the bottom of the page

Summary:

In our first Multi-Tasking test, we noticed that the virus scanning was less efficient when running FarCry in the foreground on all of the single cored Athlon 64's. It continued to run in the background, but we noticed the odd hitch in game play despite running a time demo, which should be less CPU limited as there are no AI movements and such to be calculated. We did not suffer this problem on the HyperThreaded Pentium 4's, and the Pentium D 820 and X2 4800+ were creamy smooth, as they say.

In our second Multi-Tasking test, the Pentium D 820 really showed up well against the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, which costs around four times the price. The single cored Athlon 64 processors ground to a halt and we found it very hard to control DVD Shrink - we ended up having to end the process, rather than close the program in the normal fashion. We also experienced hitching inside FarCry, more so than when the virus scanner was running in the background. In short, don't try and play games while encoding a DVD on a single cored Athlon 64 processor, you will not have a pleasurable gaming experience, no matter how fast your video card and CPU are.

Our third multi-tasking test, we experienced extreme lag during video playback, and generally the CPU did not want to handle more than one process at a time. We increased the process priority of both DVD Shrink and Windows Media Player 10 in order to complete the test, and even then, we still experienced very poor playback of our video recording. The three Intel processors and the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ did not suffer such problems, and we saw no noticeable lag during video playback, while the encoding time remained very good too. The Pentium D 820 was the pick of the Intel processors in this scenario, too.

The final multi-tasking test was the only test where we did not experience any kind of lag or hitching on the single cored Athlon 64 processors. However, the MP3 encoding time increased considerably with the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ nearly 1 1/2 times as fast as it's similarly clocked, single cored cousin. The Pentium 4 670 showed up well and the additional CPU speed really helped in this task. The Pentium D 820 was the slowest of the bunch, but we put that down to the clock speed, rather than the multithreaded capabilities of this processor.