Performance of Overclocked Sempron 3100+

Of course, the Sempron processor with 256KB L2 cache overclocked to 2.68GHz could easily compete against the fastest Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 processors. In order to evaluate correctly the level of performance an overclocker can squeeze out of the Sempron 3100+ processor on E core revision, we decided to run a separate test session where we will compare the performance of the overclocked Sempron on Palermo core with that of the high-end CPUs from both: AMD and Intel.

So, we assembled a few testbeds with the following configurations:

• CPUs:
  • AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (Socket 939, 2.4GHz, 1024KB L2, ClawHammer);
  • AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (Socket 939, 2.4GHz, 512KB L2, Venice);
  • AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Socket 939, 2.2GHz, 512KB L2, Venice);
  • Overclocked AMD Sempron 3100+ (Socket 754, 2.68GHz, 256KB L2, Palermo, revision E);
  • Intel Pentium 4 660 (LGA775, 3.6GHz, 2MB L2);
  • Intel Pentium 4 570 (LGA775, 3.8GHz, 1MB L2);
  • Intel Pentium 4 570 (LGA775, 3.6GHz, 1MB L2).
• Mainboards:
  • ASUS P5AD2-E Premium (LGA775, i925XE Express);
  • DFI DFI NF4 Ultra-D (Socket 939, NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
  • DFI LANPARTY UT nF3 250Gb (Socket 754, NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra).
• Memory:
  • Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO, 2 x 512MB, DDR400 SDRAM, 2-2-2-10;
  • Corsair CMX512-4400C25, 2 x 512MB, DDR550 SDRAM, 2.5-4-4-8;
  • OCZ PC2 4300, 2 x 512MB, DDR2-533 SDRAM, 3-3-3-8.
• Graphics cards:
  • PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (PCI-E x16).
  • PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (AGP 8x).
• HDD: Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150).
• OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP2.

Trying to squeeze the maximum performance out of a system built around overclocked Sempron 3100+, we synchronized the clock generator frequency with the memory working frequency. And I have to admit that we did it. Corsair CMX512-4400C25 memory modules worked just fine at 298MHz (596MHz DDR) with 2.5-4-4-8 timings when we increased their voltage to 2.8V.

Note that despite the single-channel mode of the Sempron 3100+ memory controller, the memory bus bandwidth grows up significantly during overclocking.

Now let’s take a look at the results of our performance tests.