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It's time for another processor review here at Neoseeker. This time we are taking a look at the Intel 840 D - a mid range dual core offering; we hope to look at its newer 65nm 940 brother in the near future.

The 840 D has the following features:

- 800MHz FSB
- two 3.2GHz cores
- one megabyte of L2 cache per core
- 16KB of L1 cache
- LGA 775 packaging
- 90nm geometry
- 1.35V core voltage
- 130W thermal power



Current Intel processors communicate through an 800MHz data rate 64 bit front side bus. This allows for a maximum of 6.4GB/sec of bandwidth for all transactions with memory and I/O, and due to the overhead of initiating such operations, and contention for the bandwidth, in real life you are unlikely to reach that maximum.

Fortunately, most applications come nowhere near saturating even an 800MHz bus, and it has been shown time and again that dual cores definitely help. Intel has pretty much maxed out single core Netburst P4 performance, shall we see how the 840 D performs?