Pentium D 2.6Ghz, HONEST evaluation

[combatcolin]

AS money is tight after moving up the property ladder {3 bed semi } i havn't been able to buy the G5 Powermac that i'e wanted since they were released.

And now im onto wondering how powerful the Intel Powermacs will be.

Anyway, the prices of Dual Core Pentiums seem to have come down a lot, with a semi decent spec Dual 2.6Ghz at around £300.

Now people, without the normal pro Apple bias, how good are the Pentium Dual Cores?

I want one mostly for WOW and watching HD movie clips, the rest of the stuff is plain vanilla PC tasts - not very CPU intensive.

Had a look at the Mini,

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/199616/

but decided its not for me, naff GPU and limited memory upgrades.

Many Thanks

 

[CanadaRAM]

I want one mostly for WOW and watching HD movie clips, the rest of the stuff is plain vanilla PC tasts - not very CPU intensive.

Had a look at the Mini,

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/199616/

but decided its not for me, naff GPU and limited memory upgrades.

You want serious gaming, you'll pay the price of the Mini for the video card alone... NV7900GTX CAN$650

 

[combatcolin]

Just WOW, maybe the Sims on a computer.

neither that demanding compared to Doom3, HL2 etc, F.E.A.R etc.

Everything else xBox/GC variou other consoles.

 

[miniConvert]

The Pentium D's are fine, just hot/inefficient. They still pack plenty of punch and the 2.6 will more than meet your needs. Of course, a semi-decent graphics card and some RAM is also important.

I'm all for it.

 

[dmw007]

The 2.6GHz Pentium D is an okay chip. The best thing about it is that it has huge OC ability- check out www.tomshardware.com they just had an article on this subject.




EDIT- here is a link to that article-

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz_cores/

 

[combatcolin]

Thanks, should have a budget of £400, so i'll plump for a better CPU cooler and silent fan, even the cheapest PCI Express card works well with WOW.