UT2003, Doom 3
Another low-detail graphical test puts the onus on the respective CPUs and subsystem. Again, the S754 Sempron 3100+ beats out Socket A Sempron 2800+ by a huge margin, certainly more than ratings would indicate. What's more, it retails at just £10 more. The trouble is, as mentioned, the lack of really inexpensive boards to partner this budget star.
Doom 3's in-built timedemo is massively system limited if one uses a high-end graphics card. The average FPS difference between running at, say, 800x600 medium detail and 1024x768 high detail is less than 5%. Doom 3 thrives from cache-heavy processors. That's perhaps why a 2.8GHz Prescott Pentium 4 is significantly better than a Sempron 3100+.
It's fair to say that Socket A AMD Sempron 2800+ and Intel's Celeron 335 are pretty evenly matched in both 2D and 3D tests. The Sempron 3100+, however, is significantly better than either in gaming-related tests. Performance simply comes down to how much AMD and Intel have lopped off their premium processors in order to categorise a CPU as budget. In the case of Sempron 3100+ it's not that much, hence the excellent gaming performance.
