Sempron 2800, SocA, 754 or AM2?!?!?

[maverick77_uk]

Hi all,

Although I'm very interested in the latest and greatest computer bits, like Intel's Core 2 Duo, unfortunately I have to stay on the budget side of computing. In this area, just a couple of quid spent in the right place can make a major difference to the budget boxes performance, which got me thinking.....

To the non-computer techie, if they bought say a Sempron 2800 based PC, and lets face it, the non-techie are more likely to buy the budget "off the shelf" machines than any supped up monster, they could potentially get a SocA 2800 Sempron (T'bed core), a 754 2800 Sempron (not sure of the core) or a AM2 2800 Sempron (Manilla Core). Although these are all "rated" the same, what is the actual difference in performance between them? How justified are AMD to give these all the same rating?

Just wondered.....

Cheers!

[jamena]

I think it might be something to do with the cache levels, and rather than looking at the chip speed or AMD-rating I'd check out a comparison review. tomshardware or anandtech probably have some decent charts to give you an idea of the performance difference.

...but tbh I reckon there are enough good deals on 939 and AM2 hardware to mean you can get a fully-cached AM2 cpu-based system rather than a sempron for very similar money.

[mofo's]

Once overclocked the lower cache models perform very well, my 2800 sempron soc 754 is currenty at 2.5GHz (easily did 2.7GHZ in DFI gb250) and is equally as fast as my VENICE 3000 at 2.5GHz

[DanceswithUnix]

They rate the processors on a bunch of business style applications, where lets face it the performance is pretty irrelevant. At things like games there is a slight difference.

The old socket A sempron is the slowest, the core is older than the A64 based models.
The S754 has a higher clock rate than the AM2 version for a given rating, so that tends to make it faster.
The AM2 is the one I bought. Performance is close enough, and you get the option of upgrading to some quad core monster in the future.

I like the rating system. It isn't perfect, but should get you ballpark on what to expect from one cpu to the next. Compare that to "how does an E6600 compare to a D915.".

[jamena]

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/cpu/charts.html
might help you vaguely...

I reckon a similarly clocked (i.e. looking at the GHz rather than the rating) sempron looks like it almost but not quite, keeps up with it's A64 counterpart in most general applications, but looking at the prices on scan the A64 is cheaper (for AM2 chips at least) The cheapest chips are the slower semprons, but as stated above the difference will only really be felt in heavy-duty applications (games, 3d-rendering, compiling code, working with large databases/files/etc. Whether you overclock or not is entirely another matter and often requires other components to be more expensive/better assuming you get a good chip.