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?
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)
#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).
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.
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.
My 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!
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 ....
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.
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
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 :(
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.
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...
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)
#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.
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.
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)
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.
Are we looking at the same graphs? There were quite a lot where the 3300+ significantly outperformed the 3100+ (granted, also a few where they were identical, but very few where the 3100+ was faster).
Which begs the question: wtf has AMD done to these things' memory controller? In many tests it ran dead even with or even outperformed the A64 3200+, with half the memory controllers and a fourth the cache (note: no, I didn't miss eg. the gaming benches where it rather sucked, but it's very surprising for it to give that kind of performance *anywhere*). At the same time, from every benchmark I've seen, Venices (Venii? :D) are only very slightly faster than Newcastles/Winchesters... strange.
With a reduce cache, the 3300 did not seemed like a good deal especially if it barely beats the 3100. Why not just get a 3100 or overclock it. Better yet, get a A64 2800+.
Once you hit a Sempron 3100+, their value becomes highly questionable because an A64 only cost a little bit more. The problem is that AMD appears to be discontinueing all A64 for the 754 socket with the exception of mobile A64. Few Mb manufacturer support mobiles directly.
AT only got 2,4 GHz with increased voltage, XBIT Labs only got 2,3 GHz; damn these are some bad 90 nm chips. WTF is AMD up to? Venice chips did 2,7 GHz easy.
As soon as get my hand on some $$$ I'm switching to S939, PCIe and a nice Venice chip. With dual core desktop Hammers not likely to appear before 2006, this will be the only game in town for the remainder of 2005 That is of course unless Pentium D tickles your fancy.
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.
The 2.4GHz overclock was the most reasonable air-cooled overclock we could obtain. Regardless of how hard we tried, 2.50GHz was not possible with our chip.
One big disadvantage of the Socket 754 Sempron would be the reduced memory bandwidth for an hypothetical "onboard video" solution. This is the main reason why I would like a dual channel Sempron that would cost much less than an Athlon 64. For now Sempron on Socket 754 (even with the lower price of the mainboards) is not a good choice in many regards
#14: Do you think AnandTech really have time for max overclocking experiements with phase cooling and stock cooling? It's all a waste. Besides, even though AT is an enthusiast site, they have more than enough projects to tackle than some enthuisiast sites who keep posting their maximum overclocks on the net. There are far too many forums and sites for that.
And yeah, enough with the conspiracy theories. It is starting to become a regular thing in comments section of every article. People always find a way to doubt AT.
#13: I disagree. Imagine if they used 6600GT for the CPUs and almost all CPUs scored identical. This would mean that the GPU is the bottleneck. AT's goal is to remove the potential bottleneck. I am sure some people would come in and whine about the incorrect results due to GPU limitations. Although you will not get the same performance as AT did, at least it shows the product's strenghts/weeknesses. :)
Considering the price of an sempron 3100+ to be $113 @ newegg and the price of a athlon64 2800+ to be $120; I see absolutely no reason to get a sempron!!!!!!!!!!!
wooo, bobsmith1492, that's the one!
and its on top of the news section too... how didn't i notice it... i must be going nuts.
well sorry about that.
THEY SPY ON US WITH RAY! Wait, I must have my tinfoil hat here somewhere....
P.S. and yeah, it'd be good to see the actual overclock max of the chip, with a mem divider and lowered htt multi and all. at various voltages. with stock and phase-change cooling. :p
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.
#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.
#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.
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?
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).
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.
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?
I would still prefer the Athlon 64 on Socket 939. However, this new Sempron would be good for some kind of HTPC/media computer. How about the power envelope? Cool and Quiet?
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53 Comments
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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.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.
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.coldpower27 - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Maybe this is a way for AMD to get rid of "sucky" Venices. Though at 127US pricing, it's value is questionable over getting the Athlon 64 2800+.Illissius - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
s/half the memory controllers/half the channels of memory/Illissius - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Are we looking at the same graphs? There were quite a lot where the 3300+ significantly outperformed the 3100+ (granted, also a few where they were identical, but very few where the 3100+ was faster).Which begs the question: wtf has AMD done to these things' memory controller? In many tests it ran dead even with or even outperformed the A64 3200+, with half the memory controllers and a fourth the cache (note: no, I didn't miss eg. the gaming benches where it rather sucked, but it's very surprising for it to give that kind of performance *anywhere*). At the same time, from every benchmark I've seen, Venices (Venii? :D) are only very slightly faster than Newcastles/Winchesters... strange.
paulsiu - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
With a reduce cache, the 3300 did not seemed like a good deal especially if it barely beats the 3100. Why not just get a 3100 or overclock it. Better yet, get a A64 2800+.Once you hit a Sempron 3100+, their value becomes highly questionable because an A64 only cost a little bit more. The problem is that AMD appears to be discontinueing all A64 for the 754 socket with the exception of mobile A64. Few Mb manufacturer support mobiles directly.
AtaStrumf - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
AT only got 2,4 GHz with increased voltage, XBIT Labs only got 2,3 GHz; damn these are some bad 90 nm chips. WTF is AMD up to? Venice chips did 2,7 GHz easy.As soon as get my hand on some $$$ I'm switching to S939, PCIe and a nice Venice chip. With dual core desktop Hammers not likely to appear before 2006, this will be the only game in town for the remainder of 2005 That is of course unless Pentium D tickles your fancy.
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.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
The 2.4GHz overclock was the most reasonable air-cooled overclock we could obtain. Regardless of how hard we tried, 2.50GHz was not possible with our chip.Take care,
Anand
Calin - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
One big disadvantage of the Socket 754 Sempron would be the reduced memory bandwidth for an hypothetical "onboard video" solution. This is the main reason why I would like a dual channel Sempron that would cost much less than an Athlon 64. For now Sempron on Socket 754 (even with the lower price of the mainboards) is not a good choice in many regardsoverclockingoodness - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
#14: Do you think AnandTech really have time for max overclocking experiements with phase cooling and stock cooling? It's all a waste. Besides, even though AT is an enthusiast site, they have more than enough projects to tackle than some enthuisiast sites who keep posting their maximum overclocks on the net. There are far too many forums and sites for that.And yeah, enough with the conspiracy theories. It is starting to become a regular thing in comments section of every article. People always find a way to doubt AT.
#13: I disagree. Imagine if they used 6600GT for the CPUs and almost all CPUs scored identical. This would mean that the GPU is the bottleneck. AT's goal is to remove the potential bottleneck. I am sure some people would come in and whine about the incorrect results due to GPU limitations. Although you will not get the same performance as AT did, at least it shows the product's strenghts/weeknesses. :)
knitecrow - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Considering the price of an sempron 3100+ to be $113 @ newegg and the price of a athlon64 2800+ to be $120; I see absolutely no reason to get a sempron!!!!!!!!!!!Visual - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
wooo, bobsmith1492, that's the one!and its on top of the news section too... how didn't i notice it... i must be going nuts.
well sorry about that.
THEY SPY ON US WITH RAY! Wait, I must have my tinfoil hat here somewhere....
P.S. and yeah, it'd be good to see the actual overclock max of the chip, with a mem divider and lowered htt multi and all. at various voltages. with stock and phase-change cooling. :p
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 + sempronxsilver - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
#2 cool'n'quiet is enabled I think, no 64bit instructions, thats all....nice article.... boring cpu :P maybe a s939 version may help things?
Calin - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
I would still prefer the Athlon 64 on Socket 939. However, this new Sempron would be good for some kind of HTPC/media computer. How about the power envelope? Cool and Quiet?snedzad - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Great article as always.---
Greetings from Bosnia.