Intel Pentium 4 670 & Pentium D 820

Final Thoughts...

Pentium 4 670: With the exception of our Unbuffered Memory bandwidth test, there is at least one Athlon 64 that is faster than either of Intel's two highly clocked Pentium 4 CPU's in almost every test.

You are very limited on the Intel front if you are looking for a hardcore gaming CPU - we recommend you don't look much further afield than an Athlon 64 at this moment in time - the majority of game engines these days benefit from the Athlon 64's shorter pipeline with greater arithmetic and FPU performance instead of making use of the insanely long pipeline in the Prescott's architecture.

Having said that, there are programs that do run well on Intel's Pentium 4, and Intel are still very strong in the DVD Encoding arena. The Pentium 4 670 represents quite poor value for money when you consider that the Athlon 64 4000+ will be as quick in the majority of single threaded scenarios and is nearly £150 cheaper - you'll also have a very capable gaming CPU, too.

Pentium D 820: On the other hand, this chip represents excellent value at an excellent £175 price tag. There are single cored Athlon 64's priced either side of it at £160 and £190 for the 3500+ and 3700+ respectively, while Intel's Pentium 4 640 and 650 sit either side of it too with similar price tags to the AMD counterparts. As an extra thought, AMD's Athlon 64 X2 3800+ - the cheapest X2 at the moment - is priced at just under £250.

In comparison to these AMD CPU's, the Pentium D 820 is great value if you are looking for a desktop workhorse that will happily do a handy amount of gaming, especially in GPU limited situations as we saw in the high-detail gaming benchmarks.

The Athlon 64 X2's are very hard to beat due to their amazing versatility, but until AMD release something even cheaper than the well-positioned Athlon 64 X2 3800+, the Pentium D 820 is a fantastic CPU for its asking price. It may not shine in any of the single threaded benchmarks, but looking at the multi-threaded applications and multi-tasking scenario's we've established, you can see where this processor comes in to its own.

I'm already looking to build my own desktop workhorse around this CPU in conjunction with the Shuttle SD31P - for the price you just can't beat this processor at the moment, especially if you are looking for something to replace your workhorse machine.