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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
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.
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.
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