Introduction

While AMD has been getting quite a lot of deserved attention from the enthusiast crowd it has recently come to our attention that for those looking for the best bang for the buck overclocking system, Intel might have something up their sleeves.

With the introduction of the Pentium D 805 Intel is offering a Dual Core CPU at half the price of the cheapest AMD Dual Core offering, and for those looking for even cheaper parts the Celeron D 356 based on 65nm process has been released too, challenging the AMD Sempron product line. While performance of both parts have been compared to the competition numerous times, we thought it would be interesting to see how these two “budget” CPU would overclock using plain air cooling (It’s hard to justify installing a $600 subzero cooling on a $150 CPU)

Specification Comparison

	Celeron D 356	Pentium D 805
Clock Speed	3.33Ghz	2.66Ghz
Dual Core	no	yes
Core Name	Cedar Mill	SmithField
Technology	65nm	90nm
Features	MMX,SSE,SSE2,SSE3,EM64T	MMX,SSE,SSE2,SSE3,EM64T
L2 Cache	512Kb	1024Kb
FSB	533Mhz	533Mhz

The Motherboard

We had to find a Socket T/S775 motherboard which offered good overclocking abilities but didn’t cost an arm and a leg, the Asus P5LD2 based on the Intel 945P chipset priced at ~$110 seems to be a good choice.

CPU Support: Intel Pentium D/Pentium 4 HT/Celeron D

DDR2 Standard: DDR2 667

FSB: 1066/800MHz

PCI Express x1: 3

PCI Express x16: 1

The motherboard’s chipsets are cooled passively interesting for those who like to build a silent budget PC



The Asus P5LD2 comes with enough features to not leave you wanting; you get RAID 0/1/5/0+1 support, onboard sound and network. For a more details on the P5LD2 check out the Asus product page.

The BIOS on the Asus offers quite a lot of options to get your system running above default



You have control over the FSB/Memory divider, so you can run the memory asynchronous from the FSB if you are using lower clocked DDR2 sticks. DDR2 voltage can be increased to 2.3v.



CPU voltage goes all the way up to 1.7v! If you are lucky enough to get your hands on an ES (Engineering Sample) you can control the CPU multiplier also in the BIOS. Last BIOS screen shows the variety of memory timings you can adjust.


Test Setup

Windwithme's Test Setup
CPU Cooling	Thermaltake Sonic Tower & Stock Cooling
Mainboard	Asus P5LD2
Memory	2*512MB DDRII 667
Video	nVidia 6600GT
Other	Seagate 7200.7 80GB SATA Maxtor 30GB 5,400rpm Seasonic 380W PSU

Time to start up the system and see how the CPU’s can be overclocked