AMD Sempron 3100+ Review - Setup and Testing
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The question that really sticks in my mind for this review is: how do you benchmark a budget CPU? If someone is seriously considering a cheap processor, generally that means performance is secondary to cost. They aren't likely to be pushing the CPU. The people to whom Durons, Celerons, and now Semprons are targeted are similar to my aunt, who--bless her heart--wouldn't notice a difference if you replaced her 2.4GHz Celeron with a 3.4GHz P4. Why? Because her use of email or Office hardly pushes the system off of idle in its basic configuration.
Benchmarks, on the other hand, strive to push use to the limit--a situation that I encounter often in my daily use, but not a likely occurrence for average folks like my aunt. For them, features like Cool 'n Quiet are more essential than any performance numbers. So instead, I was inspired to see just how a Sempron 3100+ clocked at its stock 1.8GHz would compare to my Clawhammer Athlon64 3200+ clocked to an equivalent speed. This would show exactly what kind of penalty comes from dropping 768kb worth of L2 cache on the K8 platform in a 32 bit Windows environment.
Equipment
- AMD Sempron 3100+
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+
- DFI Lanparty nF3-250Gb
- Kingston Hyper X 3000 (2*512MB)
- 2x80GB Hitachi 7K250 HD's in 64k stripe RAID 0 (nVidia onboard controller)
- Radeon 8500 LE
For this review, we gave this thing a run through a solid test suite:
- Adobe After Effects
- Adobe PhotoShop CS
- STARS CFD Solver
- Super Pi
- SPECViewPerf 7.1.1
- Unreal Tournament 2K3
- WinRAR
- LAME MP3 Encoding
- DivX Encoding
Next: After Effects and Photoshop >>
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