Sempron Overclocking - Testing: Adobe After Effects, STARS CFD Solver

• 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 of CPU dependant tasks:

• Adobe After Effects
• STARS CFD Solver
• Super Pi
• Unreal Tournament 2K3
• LAME MP3 Encoding
• DivX

Adobe After Effects

There are two parts to this benchmark. The first computation is mainly CPU based, while the second is more system oriented. (For more information, please go to Media Motion: http://www.media-motion.tv/aebenchmarks.html) The overclocked Sempron absolutely kills in this test. Time is money, and in a professional application where getting your workflow done as fast as possible is important; clock speed does matter. A lot. The first test shows a complete 1:1 ratio--for every % added to the clock speed, the time falls by that same amount. The second test is less CPU dependant, but it's still a rather noticeable gap.

STARS CFD

This test, provided by Oklahoma State University’s CASE Lab, is an excellent tool representing common computational fluid dynamic simulators. It's also an example of pure floating point math abilities.  After all that extra clock speed added on top, the Sempron is finally competitive with the what the A64 3200+ at it's normal 2GHz is capable of (~195s).  It takes quite a of extra effort in this application to make up for the cache differential. An FX-55 would clean house, considering its 1MB of cache, as well as the 2.6GHz clock speed.

Next: Super Pi, Unreal Tournament >>
 

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