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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snorre - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
It seems like AMD also has enabled 64-bit support in this CPU:http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&a...
Even better value then I guess.
snorre - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
Tbuch - Sunday, June 5, 2005 - link
In a time where the Processors are named with a lot of Letter addition Anandtech (and others) must be very caryfully to use these letters. You have been using a Intel 915P Motherboard which is a Socket 775 bord - therefor the Celeron processor you have tested must be a Celeron D 345J (with a"J" addition) and not "only" a 345. Am I right?johnsonx - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
Interesting... the board's BIOS claims Cool'n'quiet support, and I loaded the latest processor driver from AMD that claims Cool'n'Quiet support for Sempron (same one I use on my own A64 2800+), but I couldn't get the Cool'n'Quiet/PowerNow dashboard demo to run (claimed no supported processor), nor could I see any other sign that it was working, like a low processor speed report in System Properties.a mystery...
(ok, so this is a bit off topic, but at least we are still talking about Semprons)
Rand - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
I built a system around a Sempron 2600+ (S754) a few weeks ago, Cool n' Quiet worked fine on the MSI K8T Neo-FSR.Stock VCore is 1.4V, it dropped to 1.0V and 1GHz at minimum.
johnsonx - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
#47 - you may or may not be right that only 1.6Ghz semprons don't have CnQ support, but it isn't because of an 8x multiplier limitation. My A64 2800+ drops to 989Mhz on CnQ (I'm guessing that's actually supposed to be 1.0Ghz, but my mainboard's clock is a touch low). That implies a 5x multiplier. Either way, it's clear a 1.8Ghz CPU can drop to 1.0Ghz, so why can't a 1.6Ghz one do it?It'd be nice if AMD would make this clear somewhere - if CnQ is a desireable feature, then why hide which CPU's have it and which don't?
(actually disabling it on ANY cpu is stupid in the first place, but again, AMD doesn't check with me on what I think is stupid)
Oh, BTW, to answer your other question, CnQ drops my A64 2800+ to 1.0v, and as far as I can recall the Sempron 2600+ runs at 1.4v. I'll look when I setup one of them later today (they're in boxes in the customer's office now).
Visual - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
in regards to CnQ on the semprons - it is available to all semprons except the 1.6GHz models, as they are already at 8x multi by default (and CnQ lowers the multi, but it cant get any lower than 8x)I wanna know if CnQ lowers the voltages and by how much.. and if the 1.6GHz semprons come at the lower voltages by default or they are at 1.4v too... but yeah, this is quite out of the topic here. sorry.
Andyvan - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
I'm curious about the tests in which the Sempron out-performed the Athlon 64 3200. Both were running at the same clock speed, and the Sempron has 1/4 the cache.Is this due to SSE3 support?
-- Andyvan
Jep4444 - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
the XP 3200+ has been discontinued for quite some time but the A64 2800+ is still in production hence why its a better comparisonRav3n - Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - link
I would like to have seen a comparison with the Athlon XP 3200+ as well... even though that is just adding yet an additional platform.