AMD Sempron: A Fresh Take on Budget Computing
by Derek Wilson on July 28, 2004 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Test
In looking at our performance comparison, we want to pay attention to 3 different things: how the new Sempron parts do in comparison to Intel's budget line, how the K7 Sempron does against Athlon XP processors, and how the K8 Sempron does against other Athlon 64 processors in 32-bit mode.We only had time to benchmark a few new numbers, so the Athlon 64 that we chose was the 2800+ with the same clock speed and twice the L2 cache.
We used the same platforms in which we tested our Celeron D comparison last month. It is useful to note that we couldn't boot the Sempron on our usual VIA K8T800 based CPU test platform. AMD indicates that there shouldn't be any problems with the new chip booting in current boards, but that some manufacturers are working on BIOS updates that will fix this problem that we had. So this time around, we used a Gigabyte nForce3 250 board.
| Performance Test Configuration | |
| Processor(s): | AMD Sempron 2800+ (Socket A) AMD Sempron 3100+ (Socket 754) AMD Athlon 64 2800+ Intel Celeron D 335 (2.8GHz) Intel Celeron D 330 (2.66GHz) Intel Celeron D 325 (2.53GHz) Intel Celeron 2.6GHz Intel Celeron 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 2600+ AMD Athlon XP 2500+ AMD Athlon XP 2400+ AMD Athlon XP 2200+ AMD Athlon XP 1700+ AMD Duron 1.6GHz |
| RAM: | 2 x 256MB DDR400 @ 2:3:3:6 |
| Hard Drive(s): | 2 x Western Digital Special Edition 80GB |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel Chipset Driver 5.00.1009 ForceWare 3.13 nForce Driver |
| Video Card(s): | ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256 |
| Video Drivers: | ATI Catalyst 3.9 |
| Operating System(s): | Windows XP Professional SP1 |
| Motherboards: | ASUS A7N8X (Socket A) Gigabyte K8 Triton (Socket 754) ABit IS7 (Intel 865) |
Thanks to our new and improved graphing engine, our CPU articles will be a little easier to read with green for AMD, blue for Intel, and orange for the processors on which our review focuses. Our graphs will also be a little bit bigger to accommodate large data sets.
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bupkus - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
As #12 points out, power consumption and heat generation are concerns as "all onboard" mainboards lean me to MicroATX and SFF in my future builds.Falloutboy - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
sweet might be making a switch to a sempron 3100 soon....might be nice in your overclocking matchup to compare them to the the mobile bartons in terms of performance. i'm curious how my 2.5ghz barton compares to say a semperon running at 2.0-2.2ghz
LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
P.S. Is the Sempron 3100+ multiplier-locked? As some mentioned, overclocking capabilities would be good to know. :)LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Personally, I'd like to see how the Sempron 3100+ compares with the Athlon XP 3200+. Plenty of folks are on the edge about whether to hang on to their Socket A mainboard through one more upgrade, or bite the bullet. As I just bought an Athlon XP-M and have it running stably at 2.4GHz (12 x 200), which would probably equate to about Athlon XP 3300-3400 speeds if one existed, I'd like to know if the advanced memory controller would be worth my while, or if I might as well wait until the Athlon 64 platform becomes more mature and Socket 939 CPU prices come down.thebluesgnr - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
#18,I never said you can't buy AMD boards in the $40 range. I simply pointed out an error in the article. The only fanboy-like posting here is yours.
btw, it would be very hard for me to be an Intel fanboy when my main rig is powered by XP-Mobile 2400+ and my home file server is an Athlon 700MHz.
RyanVM - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
If you're planning on upgrading your DivX version to support SSE3 anyway, you might as well go straight to 5.2 and wipe the slate clean.ViRGE - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
#11, what would be the point of comparing them at equal clock speeds? The Sempron has the IPC advantage, so it would just blow the Celeron out of the water.Marlin1975 - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
OMG I love it when all the fanboys come out.Yea and there are AMD boards in the $40 range also, etc... So stop whinning.
The Sempron is faster and cheaper then a Celeron, get over it.
thebluesgnr - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
ECS 865PE-A is $46 shipped on newegg, and it has SATA.Really, the Price/Performance analysis should be redone considering there's not a $20 delta between AMD and Intel mobos, and the Sempron 2800+ should be compared to the Celeron D 330. Not to mention the difference in retail / 1000 units prices, like #14 mentioned.
Resh - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
When will these be available @ retail?