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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johnsonx - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
AMD's web site implies that Cool'n'Quiet works with S754 Semprons (for example when you click on downloads for the Sempron processors, you get several revisions of the AMD cpu driver that claim to enable Cool'n'Quiet). However I've tried enabling it on a couple of S2600's, and have had no luck. I had no trouble getting it to work on my A64 2800+, so I assume that Semprons in fact do have cool'n'quiet disabled.I think this is stupid of course, but my opinion of what's stupid obviously carries little weight with AMD...
randomman - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Nitpick: Xvid isn't at Version 5 - the lastest stable is 1.0 and beta is at 1.1. Which is it?Jep4444 - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Palermo which is based off of VeniceAsiLuc - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Is this the Venice or the Winchester core?Jep4444 - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
beat me to it eBauer, the A64 2800+ really should have been tested(ive yet to see anyone use one in a comparison versus the Sempron 3300+ yet which has been annoying me)overclockingoodness - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
#19 AtaStrumf:"As for X800XT distorting the gaming value CPU picture, I think this is something worth thinking about. Maybe you should include a test with a 6600GT, just to see if a more expensive CPU, coupled with a value graphics card actually makes any difference."
Uh, that doesn't make any sense. You won't be able to compare the high-end and low-end chips since they will perform identially on the mid-end graphics solutions. Regardless of how fast the FX55 is, when you add that with a 6600GT - the performance will degrade. Besides, all high end chips will perform almost exactly the same because GPU will be the bottleneck.
What part of bottleneck do you guys not get?
Zebo - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Those complaining about overclocks...as usual YMMV, don't take one site as gospel, all chips clock differently. Best resource to get an accurate representation is internet forums to get a cross section of the pioneers who took the chance for y'all. Another thing to keep in mind is Anandtech is'nt xtremesystems, they use safe low volts, and go for real stability, basically your average guy type overclock not screenshot overclocks.Zebo - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Makes you wonder what an AMD FX with 2MB lvl2 Cache would do???eBauer - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
I would have liked to see a A64 2800+ thrown into a mix, especially considering it shares roughly the same price as the new sempron 3300+.Including the 2800+ would have given readers a clear view on why the 3000/3200 939 cpus had the advantage (if it were due to the 512k cache, dual channel memory, or a combination of the two)
Avalon - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
My sempy 2800+ did 2.72ghz on 1.55v, so Anand must have gotten a real dud of a chip. Also, to those wondering about HTPC applications for this chip. I'm pretty positive that CnQ is disabled for semprons, and only available for the A64 line. I've been starting to realize more and more that dual channel is really beneficial to gaming on the K8 platform. There really does seem to be no reason to grab a s754 Sempron anymore, since they don't offer any significant price savings. I'm still glad I got to play with one, but I'll be much happier with a dual channel Venice.