The Pentium D 820 /left/ and Pentium 4 670 /right/

TechReport: Still, Pentium D 820's performance does present some rather bold contrasts. It's the slowest CPU in the pack whenever we throw a single-threaded test at it. The 820's gaming performance especially raises some red flags for us, as we've noted. Eventually, games will most likely make the conversion to multithreading, but in the interim, I worry that the newest, most intensive game engines may not run terribly well on a Pentium D at 2.8GHz. Many games will work just fine, no doubt, but those that use lots of AI or physics may be a strain. Hard-core gamers will want to stay away, as will others who extensively use one single-threaded application at a time. The Athlon 64 3500+ is the better choice for them.

AnandTech: So what is the final verdict? There are cases where the 670 performs better than the 570 and cases where it performs worse. It all comes back to the differences between the two processors. Running with the Pentium 4 670, some applications benefit from having more cache, and other suffer due to the higher latency. To recap, applications that stream data (encoding and rendering) aren't impacted by the cache differences between the 5xx and 6xx series. The two processors perform nearly identically in the tests we ran in these areas. Games have generally seen a boost from the added cache (we've seen this since the first Extreme Edition), so the 670 has a slight edge over the 570 in that category. Under office and workstation applications, the impact varies from case to case.

Bjord3D: More benchmarks are in order to really see how well these new processors perform, but from the tests I ran, I was surprised by the Pentium D 820. I thought that it would fall behind in many of the benchmarks because of its lower frequency, but it held pretty solid ground and put up some impressive numbers more than a couple times. It was especially interesting for me to see just how much better the Pentium D 820 performed than the Pentium 4 670 in the ABBYY FineReader 7.0 tests. To some, 15-20 seconds might not seem like a lot, but if you used applications like that day-in and day-out, then I'm sure you could really appreciate the increase in productivity and efficiency offered by the dual-core processors. Thankfully, the 820 comes in at an affordable price level.

TrustedReviews: The Pentium 4 670 is just more of the same and is expensive to boot. The Pentium D however, is a decent introduction to dual-core from Intel, and for most consumers it will be the better choice by far. It's clear that AMD's X2 is a far better performer, but it also costs a lot more. Ultimately, with Intel's projected pricing, we could see entry level dual core PCs sooner rather than later.