Introduction

We finally got to review processors designed to the low-end market, i.e., the most inexpensive processors in the market. Nowadays Intel has the advantage on the high-end market, but who gets to be the best at the low cost PC market? Read our review and find out.

Everyone who goes shopping for a PC dreams of taking home one with a high-end processor. The thing is that most of the times they can only afford the simplest model, and then the options AMD Sempron and its Intel competitor, Celeron D.

Reviewing inexpensive processors is not as easy as it seems. We have to use motherboards that are compatible with the processor purpose, i.e., we cannot use a USD 200-board to test a USD 50-processor.

That’s why we have chosen two inexpensive motherboards that are extremely popular on the market: a PCChips P21G v3.1 for the Celeron D and a Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M Ver. 2.1 for the Sempron.

Both have similar characteristics. They use VIA chipsets with the same graphics engine (P4M800 + VT8237R on the PCChips board, and K8M800 + VT8237R on the Gigabyte board) and are used by several PC manufacturers and assemblers.

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Figure 1: Platform used for reviewing the AMD Sempron processor.

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Figure 2: Platform used for reviewing the Intel Celeron D processor.

As you can see, both motherboards have AGP 8x slot and two Serial ATA 150 MB/s ports, besides 6-channel sound and Fast Ethernet (10/100 Mbps) LAN.

On the next page we will talk a more about the CPUs included in our review.

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