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Three Budget CPUs Tested
Steve writes "HEXUS.net are taking a look at three 'value' CPUs. The Sempron 2800+ and 3100+ from AMD (Socket A and Socket 754 respectively.) The price range of the three is fairly broad, the 3100+ coming out on top, also costing the most. Also, for those of you who enjoy cheap thrills, some overclocking has been thrown in, too." (The third chip reviewed is the Celeron D.)
Maybe I'm just too old school for this, but looking at the cost of a new Athlon 64 3000 and motherboard is so low that I wouldn't want to compromise and get the Sempron.
I'd prefer to spend the extra $20 or so and get the better chip.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Why did you buy an entirely new PC and not just a new motherboard?
Just keep in mind that the Celeron D, being based on the P4 "netburst" architecture, has it's performance severly dependant upon memory bandwith. The 533MHz (4x133) bus on the Celeron D is a vast improvement over the 400MHz (4x100) bus on the previous Celeries .
To get decent performance out of any P4-based system, however, it is imperative that you get a motherboard that supports dual-chanel memory, such as one based on Intel's 865 chipset. Going on the cheap and 'saving' $10-15 to get a lower-end chipset is going to seriously hurt the performance of these CPUs.
With the AMDs, it's not so important; the SocketA chips only see about a 5% performance boost from dual-channel and the s754 Sempron, with it's onboard memory controller, can't use it at all
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my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Why don't we see many benchmarks that give a CPU a price per point rating?
Watching a Sempron go from 1.75GHz at £50 to 2.0GHz at £75 implies a much greater value on the cheaper one. £25 is a bit of a difference. Especially if I clustered computers and could get three 1.75GHz chips for the price of two 2GHz ones.
SPEC2004 should keep track of prices on chips and display the value of each one, that would keep my attention for chip value.
Direct away from face when opening.
This could be a product of one of two situations:
AMD could actually be superior, and the /. community understands this and sees no point tiptoing around it.
Slashdot has become populated by people who just personally like AMD.
If the first situation is the case then why should slashdot give the Celeron equal attention? If the second is the case then even if Celerons were superior why shouldn't a community be able to talk about things it likes.
Complaints about bias on a community newssite is stupid.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
3.5GHz CPU for $100.
Damn.
Yeah, it may be 3.5Ghz, but it's still just a Celeron.
Almost none of the big name brands use a standard ATX layout. They want to discourage you from pulling their stuff apart and putting new parts in. If they could figure a way to make hard drives and CPU's "different" without it costing them too much to do so they would, I assure you.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Very good article. It is great that we are not living in Middle Ages any more and someone who uses Debian GNU/Linux can choose an architecture between IA-32, Motorola 68k, Sun SPARC, Alpha, Motorola/IBM PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, IA-64 and S/390, and in fact much more when using a BSD kernel instead of Linux, so I would expect from such a comprehensible review that it would include more than only one architecture, basically comparing apples to apples. Are they planning to add more architectures to their comparison? I really hope so because other than that it is a great review. By the way, do you know what CPU architecture I am really looking forward to? MMIX. I hope one day I will able to buy one.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Unfortunately, the Sempron is neither an AthlonXP or an Athlon 64.
The Sempron budget CPU's are derived from both Athlon XP and Athlon64 cores. However, the Sempron 2800+ is different from an Athlon XP2800+ and you would anticpate the performance would be slower due to reduced cache and other features of the Sempron.
Likewise, the "Athlon" name on it's own is an all-encompassing name for CPU's that covers several cores, much like the "Pentium" name covering the PII, PIII and P4 CPUs. The Athlon name currently covers the Athlon Thunderbird, the Athlon XP, the Athlon 64 and the Athlon FX, to name a few.
So, Sempron = Budget, Athlon = Performance. That's all that you can safely infer from the names.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Actually if you looked at the benchmarks you would find that the cheaper Semprons outperformed the more expensive Celerons, and in some cases you can see the Semprons outperforming the incredibly expensive Pentium 4 CPU.
This doesn't mean that AMD CPUs are necessarily better than Intels, I'm no rabid fanboy here. But what it does mean is that you must shop around! Look at the performance, compare it to other CPUs of the same price, before you put down your hard earned cash.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
If you buy an MSI or ASUS (or Tyan but that's pricey) AMD mobo you're pretty much guaranteed good and stable performance. You'll never see a SiS chipset, and you'll only find the most stable implementations of Via, AMD or more recently, Nvidia chipsets therein.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON