AMD Sempron 3300+ Launch
HH Test Bed and Sandra
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HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS:
We tried to ensure that all of our test systems were configured as similarly as possible for this review. Both the Sempron and the Celeron test systems were equipped with identical hardware, with the obvious exceptions being the motherboards and processors. The video cards, hard drives, memory, driver versions (where applicable), and OS configurations were identical. Before we started benchmarking, we entered the system BIOS and set each board to its "optimized defaults." We then configured our RAM to run at DDR400.
The hard drives were then formatted and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto Updating and System Restore were disabled and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
| System 1: AMD Sempron 3300+ (2.0GHz) MSI K8N Neo Platinum NVIDIA nForce 3 250Gb 2X256MB Kingston PC3500 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Onboard 10/100 Ethernet Onboard Audio Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM Windows XP Pro SP2 NVIDIA Unified Driver v5.1 NVIDIA ForceWare v71.84 DirectX 9.0c |
System 2: Intel Celeron D 335 (2.8GHz) ABIT AI7 865 Motherboard Intel 865 Chipset 2X256MB Kingston PC3500 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Onboard 10/1000 Ethernet Onboard Audio Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM Windows XP Pro SP2 Intel Chipset Drivers v6.3.0.1007 NVIDIA ForceWare v71.84 DirectX 9.0c |
System 3: AMD Sempron 3100+ (1.8GHz) MSI K8N Neo Platinum NVIDIA nForce 3 250Gb 2X256MB Kingston PC3500 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Onboard 10/100 Ethernet Onboard Audio Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM Windows XP Pro SP2 NVIDIA Unified Driver v5.1 NVIDIA ForceWare v71.84 DirectX 9.0c |
SiSoft Sandra 2004
AMD Sempron 3300+ @ 2.0GHz.
CPU;) |
Multimedia;) |
Memory;) |
Cache;) |
Intel Celeron D 335 @ 2.8GHz.
CPU;) |
Multimedia;) |
Memory;) |
Cache;) |
AMD Sempron 3100+ @ 1.8GHz
CPU;) |
Multimedia;) |
Memory;) |
Cache;) |
When we look at both CPU and Multimedia performance modules, both the Sempron 3300+ and the 3100+ held a solid edge over the Celeron D 535. Memory performance, on the other hand, was more favorable with the Celeron test bed, where both Semprons recorded virtually identical performance results. While these synthetic results are only the beginning of the benchmarking segment, it's clear from a raw CPU performance standpoint that the Sempron 3300+ brings a solid edge over a Celeron D 535 although it runs a solid 800MHz faster in terms of raw clock speed. As these results show, whether we consider the Sempron 3100+ with 256KB L2 cache or the Sempron 3300+ with 128KB of L2, each surpasses the Celeron significantly. In the next pages, we will continue to look deeper into this as we run each of these processors through a broad range of tests.
