[QUOTE="Indestructible2"]Yes Pentium D is THAT bad,if your mobo supports it,get a E4500 or a E2140 and OC it to 3GHz.gamer082009
WHy are the Pentium D's so bad if they're dual core?Dual-Core is not a guarunteed boost in performance since it really relies on parallel programming which is not always possible, and never 100% efficient. The Pentium D is the much outdated (and much despised) NetBurst architecture of the Pentium 4 (the name sends chills down my spine) which toward the end of its life, was a more effective space heater and energy-bill-jacker-upper than it was a processor. Not to say they were particularly awful chips, they just produced more heat and cost a heck of a lot more than an Athlon 64 in the Pentium 4's case, and the Athlon X2 in the Pentium D's case. My primary PC has a 3.2GHz P4 in it and it works just fine. Oh, and they were much slower.
The real problem is bottlenecking. Obviously, your computer is only as fast as its slowest part. Putting a GeForce 8800 GTS in a machine with a Pentium D CPU is like putting square wheels on a Ferrari. You've got all the horsepower in the world going into those wheels but they won't turn very fast.
If we lived in a multi-threaded world, the performance would be a lot better. However, since most games are only running on one of those cores, which isn't any faster than 3.8GHz, it's like using a single-core Pentium 4. To put this into perspective, my Pentium 4 3.2GHz Prescott machine has a GeForce 6800 GT, and in many games I see CPU bottlenecking. The GeForce 8800 GTS is probably four times faster than my GeForce 6800 GT. I'm sure anyone can see just how much of a bottleneck running a GeForce 8800 with a Pentium D at the helm is a big problem.
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