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The Sempron line is specifically targeted at the value segment of the market. However, it would be a stretch to classify the Sempron 3400+ as low-end. First off, it's priced awful close to the junior members of the Athlon64 family ($125 vs. $140 for the Athlon64 3000+). Feature wise, thanks to the new 90nm Palermo core, the Sempron line is now endowed with the full feature set of their full-blooded brethren, including SSE3, x64, NX-bit and Cool 'n Quiet support.
From a performance standpoint, we've already seen that the Sempron 3400+ offers performance reminiscent of the Socket 754 and Socket 939 Athlon64 3000+. Once overclocked, it can go toe-to-toe with the Athlon64 3700+ (both at stock and overclocked speeds) in quite a few instances or at worst still remain competitive, which should garner the interest of enthusiasts. Most impressive considering the nearly $200 price delta. For the more adventurous, the Palermo core has trickled down into the lower spectrum of the Sempron line, including the 3300+, 3000+, 2800+, 2600+ and 2500+. The lower multipliers would mean a much higher HTT frequency is required to achieve the same clockspeed as the 3400+ but the appeal of cost savings is the carrot at the end of the stick. A word of caution to enthusiasts is that while all the models should overclock equally well, the increase in clockspeed may be insufficient to compensate for the smaller 128KB L2 cache. One often-quoted caveat is that the Semprons are Socket 754 processors and hence lack some of the beneficial technologies found on the Socket 939 platform - dual-channel memory, PCI Express support, etc. However, it has been shown that having dual-channel memory does little to improve the performance of the K8 architecture (~5%). The availability of newer features has also been mitigated by the introduction of nForce4-4x based motherboards, bringing PCI Express support. While these do not support dual-core processors, we doubt this will be a huge issue for the majority of end-users. The small savings on motherboards (~$15) is also welcome icing on the cake. Overall, we'd be hard pressed to not recommend the Sempron 3400+, especially if it is coupled with a more recent Socket 754 motherboard and overclocked.
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