Conclusive thoughts :

This little CPU has surprised me big time, reminds me of the good old Celeron days. Massive +100% overclocks warranted under extreme cooling. I really had fun exploring the AMD platform, even though I wasn't as thorough as normally. But taking into consideration the little time spend exploring, I'm pretty pleased with these early results.

For daily usage this Sempron CPU isn't a stellar performer as it remains a single core CPU. Once you start opening several apps and start playing games you feel somewhat crippled. These days most users are running quad and more cores on their daily setups. Having an abundance of calculating power is always nice. Coming from a Phenom II 965BE and reverting back to a single core CPU was quite a shocking experience. Even with my Nvidia GTX 285 card, Stalker and Wolfenstein games were very choppy sometimes. But what calculating power do you expect for just 35 euro's ? In an office pc this CPU might be more than powerful enough, for the multimedia user it's better to spend a bit more cash on e.g. an Athlon II X3 425 triple core CPU.



But what fun I already had with this little critter... next up, will be tests on the 890GX platform... looking for more Mhz and better efficiency, I'll keep on updating the article with the new results...

If you want to have some cheapo fun, hunt down a solid AMD mobo and go get one of these clocking monsters.

Thx again Bernice from Gigabyte for the Gigabyte MA790X-UD3P to test these max clocks, we got some new AMD CPU's incoming... hopefully the bios team will continue to work on updates.