Techware Labs wrestles the very affordable Intel Pentium D 805 dual core processor onto the bench and observes some very impressive performance for the price. They were even able to overclock the chip by an impressive 46%. Thusly tweaked, the 805 was able to outperform the AMD X2 3800+ and the Intel 840EE dual cores, both priced much higher than the 805 (which can be had street for as low as USS130). But as AnandTech points out in their testing of the chip, it mainly shines in multithread or multitask processing, so other types of users may want to wait for AMD’s socket-AM2 to be released or for Intel’s next-gen Conroe processor.
You may also want to check AnandTech’s 805 coverage.