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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.)
That their web server isn't being hosted on one.
Semper ubi sub ubi
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
..to their more comfortable print version.
I don't do any scientific computing or anything involving too much math... if these CPUs make a few mistakes here or there it won't really bother me.
I recently bought a PC from Compaq for only $445 including free s&h and it has a a Sempron 2800. I got it as a replacement for my AthlonXP 2400+ box which had its motherboard die, and I needed a drop in replacement for my CS classes to run Linux on and the PC works like a charm. It's fast, it runs SuSE 9.1 well and was dirt cheap compared to the Intel alternative.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Now here, I'm a hardcore AMD user, I have 5 of thier athlon xp's sitting in various forms in my house. Now what is all this business about having an Athlon 64 that does not have 64 bit capability. I just dont get it. Wouldnt an athlon 64 without 64 bit capability be an athlon XP with a new core and new socket?
Has anyone noticed how the prices of AMD processors seem to have shot up in the last few months? My brother bought a retail Athlon XP 2800+ for £70 over the summer. Now a Sempron 2800+ is £76 and, and the Althon XP is £96. :(
You might be able to get some info here.
Sempron = new name for the 32 bit AthlonXP.
Athlon = `new' name for the 64 bit Athlon64.
Basically, Sempron isn't very different from the AthlonXP that we're used to (and in many cases. they're identical.) And now they'll reserve the Athlon name for the 64 bit versions. Unless I've misunderstood something ...
Well, this spoils the joke, but a word-for-word translation from Latin goes something like: "Always where under where." Think about it.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
Semper ubi Sub ubi -
Semper is Latin for "always",
Sub is Latin for "under",
and ubi is Latin for "Where".
That should help.
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
The sempron (does it fill your hdd with pr0n?) is (according to my wholesaler)the replacement for the durons.
A sempron 2400+ runs at the same clock rate as an Athlon 2000+ (1667) but can be changed to 2000 to be the same as Athlon 2400+ On chip cache is the same (256) and they seem to run almost the same speed. They were even the same price when they came out for me about a month ago.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
I would still choose the celeron D over the AMD offerings because of all the issues Iv seen with via / sis / nforce1/2 with linux and windows. THeir drivers are really not stable and I have seen really slow hdparm scores with them. I bet if you benched these cpus in linux the celeron would be the most stable because it uses its intel chipset. I think AMD cpus are AWESOME, but the motherboards chipsets people use are junk IMHO.
keanmarine.com
Not surprising that they got slashdotted when we all start sending such looooong URLs. :) OK, here are Google mirrors:
: www.hexus.net/content/news/news_archive_month.php% 3FdXJsX2FyY2hpdmVfbW9udGg9YXJjNi0yMDA0LnR4dA%3D%3D +AMD+Sempron+2800%2B+,+Sempron+3100%2B+and+Intel+C eleron+D+335+site:hexus.net&hl=en
: www.hexus.net/content/news/news_archive_month.php% 3FdXJsX2FyY2hpdmVfbW9udGg9YXJjNy0yMDA0LnR4dA%3D%3D +AMD+Sempron+2800%2B+,+Sempron+3100%2B+and+Intel+C eleron+D+335+site:hexus.net&hl=en
/ reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD04Mjc=
/ reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD04MjcmdXJsX3B hZ2U9MTA=
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:3rQXlWPbCtwJ
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:onXCbx6BBR4J
http://freecache.org/http://www.hexus.net/content
http://freecache.org/http://www.hexus.net/content
The other chip reviewed is the Celeron D.
In other words: HEY SLASHDOT, TWO NEW BUDGET ATHLONS ARE OUT...oh..and that other.. Intel thing..
Seriously though, did anyone else laugh immediately at the bias in this community? I thought it was pretty humorous...
I'll go back to my troll hole now..
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Except your simplistic model forgets to include the Sempron 3100+, based off of the Newcastle design. In other words, an a64 derivative :) The review itself includes a Sempron based off of the athlonxp and then one from the athlon64 line.
It's simply Sempron = Budget, Athlon = Performance, Athlon FX = Flagship performance and price. Currently, no semprons have 64-bit, but I expect once 64bit starts taking off they'll have to put it back in.
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
.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Sempron = new name for the 32 bit AthlonXP.
The Athlon XPs with the Barton core have 512k L2, while the Semprons have 256k.
Nobody seems to have mentioned that the socket A Semprons are in fact not related to the Athlon 64 at all, and they are not a development of current Athlon XP cores either; actually, the socket A Sempron is based off of the Thoroughbred core, which is OLDER than the current Barton core. So personally I would recommend snapping up Barton-core XP chips while you still can, rather than buying these new "budget" Semprons.
I just put together a Sempron 3100+ (i.e. A64 core) system for a mate. As an indication of it's use, it has a 9600XT - so "mid-level" gaming - Neverwinter Nights, Doom 3 on reasonable quality levels.
I was impressed by the performance. But I was blown away by the temperatures. After pushing it though 3DMark 2001 and Aquamark (12301 and 29381 respectively - highest score on any of our machines) it was running at 43 celsius. Ambient at the time was about 30 celsius. And this was in a system so quiet that I couldn't hear a damn thing, even with my ear right near the box (Antec).
The new core is *much* better than the Athlon XP core.
Honestly I'm not an AMD fanboy (even though I should be, all things considered) ... but I would say that the article glossed over the part I found most interesting : with an entry price of about a hundred bucks the Celeron D will overclock to 3.5GHz with relative ease.
3.5GHz CPU for $100.
Damn.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
"That's been the fate of the much-maligned Celeron of late. AMD, on the other hand, has been mixing it its midrange with low-end Athlon 64s whilst also continuing with the erstwhile Athlon XP and a select range of Durons."
"Rather, it seems that its numbering scheme has always tried to approximate the MHz rating from its erstwhile competitor's CPUs."
Looks like the author learned a new word, how exciting for him. Although I think "competitor's erstwhile CPUs" would have made more sense.
erstwhile
adj : belonging to some prior time; "erstwhile friend"; "our
former glory"; "the once capital of the state"; "her
quondam lover" [syn: erstwhile(a), former(a), once(a),
onetime(a), quondam(a), sometime(a)]
adv : at a previous time; "once he loved her"; "her erstwhile
writing" [syn: once, formerly, at one time, erst]
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Is the Athlon XP-M 2500/2600. Unlocked multipliers, hand-picked cores, and cheap to boot. You're pretty much guaranteed that one will hit 2.3 GHz, and with good air cooling, 2.5 GHz is even possible.
What's better, because of the unlocked multiplier, you can throw fast memory on the board, and overclock the memory/FSB as far as the motherboard will go, *then* turn the clock speed up. I'll bet that one of those would have beaten the entire lot that they tested.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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
I recently built a system for the kids to use. It was going to be mainly used for web browsing, email, dvd playback and word processing (homework).
I get most of my components from ebuyer and I originally wanted a fairly inexpensive Athlon XP2500+ cpu. However, as I gradually put the separate items into the cart, the damn XP2500 went out of stock, and the higher rated chips cost more than I wanted to spend.
So reluctantly, I added a 2500 sempron instead, while worrying about the reduced onboard cache (256 instead of 512k )
I built the system, and installed SUSE 9.1 via an FTP install.
Well, the damn thing was slow as f**k. The browser kept hanging (firefox) and the screen refresh was slow and the whole system felt bad. Admittedly, I am using the onboard graphics on the MSI micro atx mboard, but even so, it was sharing 64MB ram of the 512 available.
Seriously not impressed !
Anyway, as a last resort, I tried installing FC2 instead of SUSE yesterday. What a difference !
The systems feels right now, no problems with the browser and the systems responds as it should for its capabilities. I guess what I'm saying is, that unless you want a dedicated fps gaming machine then the semprons are fine. And I didn't even use the fastest available chip. I am still adding an AGP 8x graphics card though, coz the dvd playback will be so much better.
Full system specs (with ebuyer quick find codes):
MSI KM4M-V SKT A 8xAGP Onboard VGA/Sound/LAN ATA133 MATX CPU support Up to XP 3200+ (FSB333) Retail Box - £29.30 - 65354
AMD Sempron 2500 (sda2500box) Processor 256Cache 333FSB Retail box with 3 year warranty - £44.24 - 65076
Crucial 512 DDR333 PC2700 DIMM - £47.51 - 42149
Seagate Barracuda 40GB 7200rpm UDMA100 UIDE - OEM - £29.74 - 32050
Casetek CK-1007-2B Black And Silver Mini Atx Case With 250WATT PSU - £14.99 - 66024
Nec 8x DVD Dual R/RW IDE BLACK Burner - OEM - £36.95 - 58481
Mitsumi OEM Black Internal Floppy Drive 1.44mb 3.5 Inch - £3.59 - 62047
Logitech Black with Silver PS2/USB Optical Desktop Keyboard And Mouse - OEM - £19.70 - 52117
Fedora Core 2 - £free !
Sub-total £226.02
vat (17.5) £ 39.55
carriage £ 10.00
Total £275.57
Adding this later:
Gainward Fx Powerpack! Pro/660 AGPx 8 TV-DVI Fx5200 128MB Retail Box - £32.95 + vat - 59427
So not bad for just over £314 !