AMD's Sempron 3300+: 90nm Budget Computing
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 18, 2005 2:10 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Overclocking & Final Words
As a general use CPU for office applications and your normal day-to-day tasks, the Sempron is quite strong and definitely faster than its Celeron D counterpart. However, applications for the power user, workstation user or the gamer suffer greatly because of its single channel memory controller and small L2 cache. But given that the new Sempron is built on AMD's cooler 90nm process, we decided to see how far the new chip would overclock.
The Sempron 3300+ has a default core voltage of 1.400V. Bumping it to 1.500V and increasing the FSB to 240MHz yielded us a nice and even 2.4GHz, a 20% increase in clock frequency. But the real question is, how much of a performance boost will the added clock speed bring you?
While we didn't run a full suite of tests, we picked a handful of our benchmarks on which to focus in order to get a good idea of whether or not overclocking will make Sempron any more desirable. The end result was basically this:
- In applications where the Sempron was already quite competitive with similarly clocked Athlon 64s, the overclocked Sempron did extremely well, as you would expect.
- In those applications, particularly games, where the Sempron didn't do so well, overclocking did nothing to help. For example, despite a 20% increase in clock speed, Doom 3 performance only went up by around 4% when we overclocked the Sempron 3300+.
Our overclocking findings helped create a general recommendation for the Sempron; for those users who are most likely to want to overclock to increase performance, the Sempron (despite its wonderful overclockability) isn't the chip for you. Gamers will find that similarly priced Athlon 64s are much better performers, especially if you are able to use the Socket-939 platform.
If you're debating between a Sempron 3100+ and a 3300+, the two often times perform identically to one another. Some applications will favor the Sempron 3100+'s larger L2 cache, while others will favor the higher clock speed of the 3300+. We generally prefer the 3300+, thanks to its cooler running 90nm process, but the two do perform very similarly and are hard to tell apart in real world usage.
Compared to Intel's Celeron D, the Sempron continues to be the better buy and overall, the better performer. According to Intel's roadmaps, a 3.2GHz Celeron D is due out soon, but until then, the Sempron manages to hang on to the budget CPU throne.
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AtaStrumf - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
#28 overclockingoodnessMy point exactly!!! Someone with an AXP and a 6600GT looks at those charts and thinks: "Holy crap, I really gotta get me a S939 Athlon 3200", when in reality that would be a waste of his money, becasue his GPU would be the bottleneck and a S939 chip would not be able to do $h!t for him. That's why I think, it is important to run CPU game tests with a comparible GPU, otherwise the picture is seriously distorted!
The best thing to do, would be to run both sets of tests, because running just high end GPU tests is not telling the whole story. A VERY IMPORTANT PART is missing!
Because of tests like this, I don't really know how much of a bottleneck my Athlon 3200+ S754 is or is not, when coupled with my 6600GT. Should I primarily invest in a new CPU or a new GPU? Only if I get a new high end GPU, can I actually use tests like this to tell me if I should also get a new CPU or is that just a waste of my money?
GPU tests make this same mistake, by eliminating the CPU bottleneck, by using FX-55 and co. The problem is, that by doing so, they venture in unreal territory, with, for the most part, unrealistic CPU/GPU combos. Great for theory, not so great for practice!
nserra - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
I mean DUAL CORE READY.nserra - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
I think this review lacks Athlon 64 with socket 754. Unless Athlon 64 with that socket is dead?Even so is not right comparing a socket 939 with a socket 754 CPU.
AMD is doing great with this new CPUs, too bad they have a bad markting machine.
Right now if INTEL WAS AMD we were already having a campain saying DUAL CORE COMPATIBLE on socket 939 boards. But no ....
alangeering - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
can any reviewer give a guide as to which tests included SSE3 optimisations?This was not stated in the review.
Until the newer stepping of A64, many will not have SSE3, and so, in some media encoding tests you may have been able to show a difference between the A64 and the Semperon (in the semperon's favour).
I'm running an A64 3000 on S939, with no SSE3 support.
KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
Tujan: The Lightscape benchmark comes as a portion of SPECviewperf 8.1. It is not a standalone application.Kristopher
karlreading - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
This reminds me a little of a few years back when a thunderbird cost barley more than a spitfire / morgan. made the duron have no market place. AMD should keep the sempron much more crippled than the a64, to give the sempron its market and protect high end a64 chips sales / status. either that or make the lower number a64's unavalible sooner, and replace them with sempys at higer numbers.karlos
DrMrLordX - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
Cool & Quiet only works for the Sempron 3000+ or higher. The socket 754 2600+ and 2800+ do not support it.cryptonomicon - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Man I wish there was an exciting TWIST In this article, oh well. Just looks like AMD looked to cut costs in the latest sempron and produce a more power/heat efficent processor, not much fancy :(Avalon - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Zebo, you know I work for stability :)Tujan - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Anybody Have a Link to the Program used here. To browse:"""Lightscape Viewset (light-07)
"The light-07 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the Lightscape Visualization System from Discreet Logic. Lightscape combines proprietary radiosity algorithms with a physically based lighting interface.
The most significant feature of Lightscape is its ability to simulate global illumination effects accurately by precalculating the diffuse energy distribution in an environment and storing the lighting distribution as part of the 3D model. """....
I looked at AutoDesk but 'Lightscape,is no longer supported/obsolete. Cant be the same program. thanks.