Recently I carried out a very cheap Sempron 2800+ 754-pin upgrade that was designed to replace an old Pentium III 533MHz system. For just $235 US this Sempron upgrade completely transformed the existing computer into something very capable of carry out day to day activates. Surprisingly this budget AMD Sempron system was not all that bad on the gaming front either, given it was competing with an Athlon64 3800+. Of course the Athlon64 was limited by the GeForce 7600GT which was used for the 3D rendering stuff.

Nevertheless, for just $235 US this budget upgrade delivered stunning results. Given the Sempron was limited to operating in single channel mode with just one 512MB DDR400 memory stick, the results really were quite good. The biggest limitation of the Socket 754-pin Sempron was its inability to utilize dual-channel DDR technology. This limited the on-die memory controller to just 3.2GB/s of available memory bandwidth. Thankfully, the Sempron 2800+ clocked at 1.6GHz was a decent overclocker, as it comfortably managed 2.4GHz using the box cooler.

The other problem with the Socket 754-pin Semprons was that they were limited to the 754-pin bus with no 939-pin versions available. This meant if you went with a 754-pin Sempron the ability to use a new 939-pin Athlon64 processor was not available which did drastically limit the flexibility of the platform. This limitation has been removed as AMD are now migrating to their new platform which they call AM2! The good news for budget Sempron buyers is that the processor now supports dual-channel memory.

This is no doubt going to give the little old Sempron a bit more oomph. The dual-channel support comes from a new on-die memory controller that supports DDR2 memory technology. This means that AM2 Semprons can now support DDR2-667 memory in dual-channel mode, boosting the available memory bandwidth to a staggering 10.6GB/s! While AMD does not list it, the 2800+ is available on the AM2 platform and I just purchased one online from MegaPC.com.au for a steal.

I picked up my processor for just $115 AUD and many US online retailers have them for as little as just $75 US! The 3600+ is also available for just $200 AUD and is clocked at 2.0GHz with a 256KB L2 Cache. The 2800+ on the other hand is still clocked quite well at 1.6GHz, though it only features a L2 Cache of just 128KB. Honestly right now the 3000+ is probably the best AM2 Sempron available as it's still only clocked at 1.6GHz but it does feature the full size L2 Cache and only costs a fraction more than the 2800+.

Nevertheless, for now I have gone with the ultra cheap AM2 Sempron 2800+ as I am keen to see how it stacks up against the older Socket 754-pin version. Along for the ride we have the MSI K9N Neo motherboard sporting the new NVIDIA nForce 550 chipset. This is the baseline chipset of the nForce 500 series, but do not let that fool you as it is still a very well equipped product. The MSI K9N Neo retails for just $95 US which is a bargain, given the boards impressive list of features. The board was also decked out with two sticks of Corsair DDR2-533 512MB ValueSelect memory.

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