Of course, this frequency growth cannot boost the performance of the CPU much. To estimate the performance gain, we compared our Socket 939 Sempron 3000+ overclocked to 2.43GHz with an Athlon 64 3800+ (2.4GHz default frequency) using the same computer as in the tests above.

As you can see, the L2 cache reduced to 128KB does limit the performance of the Sempron 3000+ considerably, even though this CPU is equipped with a dual-channel memory controller and a 1GHz HyperTransport bus. The Socket 939 Sempron 3000+ clocked at 2.43GHz was about 5-10% slower than the Athlon 64 3800+.

But well, this is a matter of perspective. Our overclocking results may look quite bright if viewed from the price factor standpoint. In fact, our overclocked Sempron 3000+ closely approached the level of performance of a CPU model thrice its cost!