At this point, it would be rather interesting to see how the D 820 performs in some tasks while there are others running in the background. For example, if you are an extreme gamer but you also want to download from the internet, how will this affect the actual frame rate and by how much? How about encoding a movie while listening to music? We will try to answer these kinds of questions with our simple tests that follow.

We are pretty sure that if we ran several tasks at the same time, the D 820 will eventually reaches its limits. But the most important thing is to cover everybody's needs with the most common tasks. For this reason, we selected the following combinations of tasks.

Our first attempt was to measuring the framerate in HL2 while in the background, we ran DVD Shrink, encoding in low priority mode. DVD Shrink was reading from the Primary HD while it was writing to an external burner. The games were installed on the Primary HD.

As you can see, the framerate is not greatly affected and you are still be able to play your favorite games while converting your movies. As it was reasonable to expect, DVD Shrink encoding time was almost doubled, from 7:55 min to 15:16 min. Framerates were decreased. Performance from the D 820 is good, but if you set the resolution at a high rate and enable advanced filtering, then it is possible that you might notice some difference while playing.

Our second experiment involved encoding with DVD Shrink and at the same time converting 16 wav files to MP3. Each task separately needed 7:55 min for the encoding with DVD Shrink and 4:48min for converting the 16 wav files (a full AudioCD of 700MB), to MP3 with dBpower. When we then ran these two tasks simultaneously, the times required changed to 15:06min and 4:58min for DVD Shrink and dBpower respectively. Since dBpower finished earlier, we kept repeating the audio conversion so as to have both tasks running at the same time.

The performance of the D 820 under multitasking is quite satisfactory, although we did expect something better. If you really need more processing power, then you'll have to go for the D 840, but it also costs double the price of the D 820...