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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Bapster - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Why dont they use a mid-range video card with a budget cpu ???It's like buying an FX-55 and using a 9250 Readon
These articles would be better using an X700 or 6600 GT .
But thats only my two cents.
PrinceGaz - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
sorry my reply was meant for #7PrinceGaz - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
#6- the review says "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."That wording suggests they did not attempt to find how fast it could go, only that they chose 2.4GHz because it was a convenient speed (a straight 20% increase) to see how much difference it made in real-world performance. I would be interested to know just how high it could go to both at default voltage and a modest overvolting.
bupkus - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
#7 Yes, and of course the Celeron D can easily OC to 3.6GHz; I have a 320 that does that quite handily. But I still got the point the author was trying to make. Overclocking a cpu with limited cache has limited benefit as it still operates best within it's strengths.bobsmith1492 - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Visual -http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.aspx?i=2411...
This news post? I don't see any removed news post.... chill with the conspiracy theories.
Visual - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
ok what's with this? there was a news post about someone else's review of 3300+, i think from april 15th, now you post your own review and remove the news post? why'd you remove the newspost?DrMrLordX - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
You guys only hit 2.4 ghz on the Sempron 3300+? Man, all the OCs I've seen on the 2600+ and 2800+ have hit 2.4 ghz fairly easily. My 2800+ hit 2.4 ghz with a vcore bump, and 2.3 ghz without any vcore adjustments at all on the stock heatsink. All that, with 256k l2 cache.The 3300+ doesn't seem like a very good choice for overclocking compared to the 90 nm 2800+ and 3100+(yes, there are 90 nm 3100+ cpus out there).
snedzad - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
According to latest unofficial AMD roadmap (http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/attachments/amdroadmap_bc... it doesn't seem that Sempron will ever be available for 939 sck. Both 754 and 939 will be replaced with M2 socket in 2nd half of 2006.plewis00 - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Probably because they consider dual-channel memory a high-end thing and don't want to pass it down to the budget-end, the same thing with HT and Intel Celerons.Anyway someone said AMD are releasing an S939 Sempron didn't they?
arfan - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
why there is no sempron 4 socket 939 ? i want to buy socket 939 + sempron