AMD Opteron 180 vs Intel Pentium D 820

AMD Opteron 180 and Pentium D 820 processors were tested using different system components, that are identified by MB, RAM and VID columns in the tables below. The numbers in each of these columns correspond to one of motherboards (MB), memory configurations (RAM) or graphics adapters (VID), listed below:

MB - Motherboard(s):
1. ABIT KN8 SLI
2. INTEL DP965LT
3. ASROCK 4CORE1600TWINS-P35

RAM - Memory:
1. 2GB DUAL-CHANNEL CORSAIR CMX1024-3200C2PT
2. 2GB DUAL-CHANNEL CORSAIR CM2X1024-6400C4
3. 2 GB DUAL-CHANNEL CORSAIR CM3X1024-1333C9 DDR3

VID - Video card(s):
1. POWERCOLOR 24PRO256M DDR2 (ATI RADEON HD2400)

All tests were performed at default frequency and voltage, using manufacturer's stock fan/heatsink. None of the components were overclocked. Motherboard BIOS options were left at default settings.

The results of all benchmarks are broken into four categories: multi-threaded, single-threaded, memory intensive and graphics / gaming.

Single-threaded benchmarks run on a single CPU core, and do not depend on such features as the number of cores, or Hyper-Threading technology. Additionally, they do not utilize on-chip caches, dedicated to other cores.

AMD Opteron 180           Intel Pentium D 820
CINEBENCH R10 CPU score (1 core) benchmark
Measures performance of a single-core rendering of a photo-realistic 3D image using CINEMA 4D software engine.
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		3	3	1
		2	2	1
PCMark2002 CPU score benchmark
Measures integer and floating-point performance of a single CPU core by running 6 different algorithms, and calculates a weighted score based on the results.
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		2	2	1
		3	3	1
Super PI (1M) benchmark
Measures time, required to calculate the first 1 million digits after the decimal point in the number Pi.
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		2	2	1
		3	3	1

Multi-threaded benchmarks utilize all CPU cores and other on-chip resources (on-chip caches, internal buffers, etc). Intel's Hyper-Threading feature also helps to improve multi-threading performance.

AMD Opteron 180           Intel Pentium D 820
CINEBENCH R10 CPU score benchmark
Measures performance of multi-core rendering of a photo-realistic 3D image using CINEMA 4D software engine.
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		3	3	1
		2	2	1
CINEBENCH R10 render time (seconds) benchmark
Measures time taken to render a photo-realistic 3D image using CINEMA 4D software engine.
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		3	3	1
		2	2	1
Euler3D benchmark
Solves specific computational fluid dynamics problem, and reports a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		3	3	1
		2	2	1
Sandra Dhrystone (MIPS) benchmark
Runs Dhrystone test on all cores, and reports estimated integer performance in MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second).
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		3	3	1
		2	2	1
Sandra MultiMedia Floating Point (it/s) benchmark
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		3	3	1
		2	2	1
AMD Opteron 180           Intel Pentium D 820
Sandra MultiMedia Integer (it/s) benchmark
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		3	3	1
		2	2	1
Sandra Whetstone (MFLOPS) benchmark
Runs Whetstone test on all cores, and reports estimated floating-point performance in MFLOPS (Millions of Floating-Point Operations Per Second).
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		3	3	1
		2	2	1
Sandra Whetstone SSE2 (MFLOPS) benchmark
Runs SSE2-enabled Whetstone test on all cores, and reports estimated floating-point performance in MFLOPS (Millions of Floating-Point Operations Per Second).
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		3	3	1
		2	2	1
wPrime v1.55 (32M) benchmark
wPrime benchmark measures time taken by all logical processors to calculate square roots of numbers from 1 to 33554431 (32M).
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		3	3	1
		2	2	1

Graphics benchmarks depend on the type of integrated or discrete graphics adapter, and to less extent on the processor performance. Because these benchmarks are synthetic, they may not truly represent gaming performance. However, they still can be used to estimate whether one processor will perform faster or slower than another CPU in games and other 3D tasks.

AMD Opteron 180           Intel Pentium D 820
3DMark2001 score benchmark
Runs a series of game simulations and feature tests to measure graphics and 3D game performance of discrete and integrated GPUs. It utilizes a single CPU core, and it is compatible with DirectX 8 and later APIs.
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		2	2	1
		3	3	1
CINEBENCH R10 OpenGL score benchmark
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		2	2	1
		3	3	1

Memory-intensive tests or programs move large amounts of data to/from memory, and they depend more on memory throughput and the size of on-chip caches, rather than on CPU integer/FP/SIMD performance.

AMD Opteron 180           Intel Pentium D 820
7Zip compressing/decompressing speed (1 thread) benchmark
Estimates MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) rating of a single thread by measuring data compression and decompression speeds, and dividing averaged result by the number of threads.
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		2	2	1
		3	3	1
PCMark2002 Memory score benchmark
Measures performance of read, write and modify operations in main system and video memory.
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		2	2	1
		3	3	1
		1	1	1
WinRAR 3.71 (32-bit) compressing/decompressing speed benchmark
Measures compression and decompression speed of random data in KB per second
Longer is better		MB	RAM	VID
		1	1	1
		2	2	1
		3	3	1