Battle 3: Celeron D vs. Sempron
AMD just recently introduced their new low-end branded CPU: Sempron, and as we've already seen it does a wonderful job of outperforming Intel's Celeron D, however the margin of improvement is far less than what we're used to seeing thanks to a much improved Celeron D. How does the Sempron fare under Doom 3? Let's find out:
Remember that there are two flavors of Sempron, a K7 and a K8 version. The K7 version performs just like an Athlon XP since it's basically a Thoroughbred core with its 256KB L2 cache. The biggest performance limiter to the K7 based Sempron 2800+ is that it has no on-die memory controller, bringing its performance down pretty far.
But the K8 based Sempron 3100+ does some serious damage, outperforming the Celeron D 335 by an incredible 53%. For a budget Doom 3 system, you will want to steer far away from a Celeron D and towards the Sempron. As we've seen before, the cache size dependency of Doom 3 on the Pentium 4 is significant and even though the Celeron D and the Sempron both only have a 256KB L2 cache, the Sempron's on-die memory controller helps reduce the impact of such a small cache on Doom 3 performance.
The winner here is Sempron.
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Thorne - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
SMP Anyone? Doom III should support smp... has anyone found it?Thorne - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
jrphoenix - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Intel and gaming don't mix. Where is Peteroy when you need him? LOL. My 3800+ is looking better and better each day :)magratton - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Is there any possibility that you could produce some numbers for the cpu overclockers who placed their bets on the Athlon XP2500M instead of the A64? Great article, thank you!ceefka - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Oh my, I guess the Pentium EE is indeed the Extra Expensive Emergency Edition.I'm not much of a gamer though. It's a shame I wrecked my car a few weeks ago. I wanted to build a 939 since they also perform so well on sound and video. Have to wait now. Well there's one upside to that, prices will drop a bit, or so I hope.
Say AT, how about soundbenchies, especially Cubase SX, or similar, with a fixed arrangement, sound & midi with VST instruments and then add stuff like plug-in effects until the system throws up. I have read that Dual Opteron systems can handle 100 audio channels with about 80 realtime plug-ins. How far does say the top 20 of these CPU's carry you. I suppose Hyper Threading would help out Intel here. So I'm very curious.
msva123 - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
If only you could download hardware...Sonic587 - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
I find it remarkable how the A64 3000+ manages to get within 2FPS of the 3.4GHz EE. We have a lowly $160 processor almost besting a $1000 EE. Wow.Adul - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
drool :D cant wait to upgrademkruer - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
LOL im still not buying and AMD 64 chip til the end of the year, but its good to know that the 3500+ on socket 939 still beats*ntels best