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Date |
: Nov 16th, 2005 |
| Category |
: CPU |
| Manufacturer |
: AMD |
| Author |
: Jin-Wei Tioh |
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Gaming is one area where it has been shown where the more L2 cache the merrier. This is the reason why the Athlon64 FX was bar none the best gaming CPU when it was released together with the regular Athlon64. Thus, we would naturally expect the performance of the Sempron 3400+ to suffer. Is this how it really pans out?
Our gaming test suite has been updated considerably to include the latest batch of popular games. All tests were conducted at low resolutions to avoid having the GeForce 6600GT in the testbed result in the game being GPU limited. Quake 4 and Half-Life 2 were tested using timedemos recorded in-house. Far Cry was tested using the Regulator timedemo from Tech Report. Unreal Tournament 2004 was tested using the UMark botmatch tool with 16 bots. Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas was tested using FRAPS to record the average framerate during the playback of the intro sequence. Finally, Final Fantasy XI was tested using the official benchmark tool from Square-Enix.
Unfortunately, the Sempron's smaller cache size hurts its gaming performance as expected. While still offering competent performance, the overclocked Sempron 3400+ barely keeps up with the Atlon64 3700+ at stock speeds or loses to it.
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