Playing a Couple of Games on a Pentium D-equipped Dell Dimension E520
In April 2005, AMD introduced the Athlon 64 X2, a line of CPUs that paired two K8 cores onto one die. AMD’s dual-core solution would be the stepping stone for most multi-core desktop CPU designs going forward. Around the same time, Intel introduced their dual-core CPU lineups, both under the Xeon and the newly branded Pentium D lineup. These CPUs paired two NetBurst cores onto one die that shared no resources and would communicate through the northbridge. Bad core-to-core latency paired with the notoriously hot and heavy Prescott cores meant that Pentium Ds quickly acquired a reputation for being terrible in a number of applications.
In 2006, Intel attempted to rectify a couple of issues with the Prescott lineage of the NetBurst architecture by die shrinking it and by adding a couple of features for the Pentium Ds and the corresponding Xeons. This Dell has a Pentium D 925, which means that it didn’t receive any of the new features that came with the Presler update. However, it did receive the die shrink, so it runs cooler than the prior Smithfield chips.
Which leads us to this desktop. This is a Dell Dimension E520 which originally shipped with an Intel Pentium D 925, an Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS, 1GB of RAM and Windows Vista Home Basic. I have upgraded it with another 1GB of RAM, a 128GB SATA SSD and an ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro with 128MB of VRAM, which is probably a sidegrade over the 8400 GS but runs a lot cooler than that card did. Here I attempt to run Blur, FlatOut 2 and Team Fortress 2. Unfortunately, the lack of VRAM means that Blur wasn’t playable, but the other two games ran surprisingly okay.
Enjoy me looking at how this desktop can run three games.
