Very impressive overclock, i found it quite informative and was very surprised to see it beat the A64 by 101 secs in Lame encoding as well as all other benchmarks, truly is a superb cpu.

In total how much was your water cooling setup? I know you say it's cheaper than a fx-55 but there wasn't a mention on how much your WC setup cost.

I don't know what the equivalent cost would be now. Especially the way I built it, not exactly using "commercial" parts.

Say $200 in total, $40 block, $60 pump, $60 rad, $40 for odds and ends like resevoir, tubing, clamps, algae eater, etc. So $200 + $120 CPU, that's still a whole heck of a lot cheaper than an FX. And if you are smart with the block you buy/make, you can attach it to any socket, and keep the setup forever.

Nice overclock, would have been interesting to see benchmarks comparing the overclocked sempr0n to an overlocked A64 at the same speed. Apart from that, I have no arguments to make. Great review.

DMOS does it again. Another admazing article for DMOS.

I recently purchased a 3100+ and an MSI K8N Neo Platinum nforce3 mobo. With stock cooling and Kingston Valueram (1.5 Gb) and 4 ide Hard drives and 2 ide optical drives (raid card) my Antec 350W PSU can get the sempron up to 2.25 GHz. anymore and I'm pretty sure its the RAM that gives up. Still I'm pretty pleased with that performance. 8D

My 3100+ runs rock solid @ 2.502 Ghz 278x9 cpu/11 Geil Value Ram DDR400 Asus K8N. Out performs FX-53 in Sandra 05.

What where the setting for that overclock i'm brand new....

I currently have a Acer Aspire 3003WLCi notebook with the Mobile Sempron 3000+ which is pretty much the same CPU as in the topic except with only 128k L2 cache instead of 256k, I'm thrilled to know I could potentially get 2.6ghz out of this CPU. The only problem is that everyone does not have the same BIOS with all the options and many bios have few if any useful settings and no FSB or voltage options. If a software overclocking tool could be referenced that would work it would be greatly appreciated. Or even a mobo manual with jumper settings if applicable. My motherboard is a Acer Lugano M with the SiS 760GX Rev. 3 Chipset.

I was also able to get my sempron to run at 2.5 GHZ 278x9 and it was stable, i used no excess cooling, but i plan on buying some extra fans for it soon