I remember seeing these on Amazon back in the introduction of the FX era. I nearly bought one purely because all the reviews said I could unlock that second core… I ended up spending an extra £20 and got an FX4300. That GTA V loading actually is the only thing I’ve ever seen come to a Celeron D in load times. Wow. Loved the video man 👍
Did that with the Phenom X3, turns out not all 3 core chips was in fact perfectly fine 4 cores, cut down to meet demand, as many internet forums were claiming, the 4th core was never entirely stable. Did run it as a 4 core for a while, but if I wanted stability I either had to underclock it, or revert to 3 cores.
@@ZnakeTech yeah I tried it with an Athlon II x3 (which we referred to as a cripple core processor instead of triple core) and no dice either. I’ve seen people do it successfully though. Even a Phenom II X2 that unlocked to X4 and the X4 T Phenoms that were secretly X6s.
@@ZnakeTech The way I heard reviewers explain things like this is it's a gamble. But, kind of in reverse if you bought it expecting it to be as labeled. Just with a hidden bonus if you can make it work as originally spec'd. Sometimes a chip had defects but was fine after being modded to lower spec, sometimes it was perfectly fine but features disabled to fill demand for lower spec.
Core unlocking was very common back then and especially later on in the life cycle (when yields were better) of the single and triple cores a gamble some were willing to take when on a tight budget. It was an interesting time.
I bought one of these chips in 2011 for one specific reason: I bought an AM3 board for a computer build I'd saved up for, and found out after putting it together to test, that couldn't boot Piledriver CPUs without a BIOS update. it was cheaper and quicker to get the Sempron 130 than to RMA the board.
Thats the reason this chit was released. though I believe the Idea was so that shops could do the updating without having to put a more expansive cpu on the line, people did also buy them to play around with.
Reminds me of when the K6-2 400 came out - BEFORE MS had support for the CPU baked into windows. We LITERALLY had to UNDERCLOCK the CPU to 300 MHZ, install Windows, install a patch made by AMD, THEN return the clock speed to 400!
@@KalakCZ how do you update a bios when the system won't boot with the CPU. that was the problem. people bought a new motherboard with cpu and it couldn't boot.
There was a point where Microcenter was selling those for 5 dollars. Most wound up being used for testing, linux boxes doing small tasks or monitoring.
@@CameronVanNatta And today to... Raspberry Pi is not cheap compared to refurbished or "new old stock". Unless you want energy efficiency, then the pi zeros and picos are great!
@@Jossandoval yeah, zero and pico for little tinkering is great. But if you wanna buy pi 4 pi 5 for homelab or doing smth more, at that point just grab some used Intel gen6 mini pc.
Amd has one of the coolest naming scheme, Ryzen, Sempron, Phenom, Athlon, Epyc, Threadripper, Radeon, Vega. Not to mention their code names so much better than the lake code names of intel.
Intel had a good naming scheme before. now its rather strange. but i absolutely ADORE the AMD namings of APU nowadays, which are all dedicated to Final Fantasy seies (like Arieth and Sephiroth APUs in Steam Deck, Oryon and Scarlett in Xbox / PS and so on). they have almost all Final Fantasy heroes in their lineups now
I remember unlocking these cpu's, it wasn't lowering clock speed that usually got them to work, it was putting a LOT of voltage through them. Your mileage may vary.
I got lucky with my 130, it just worked with only being unlocked. Ran stable for its entire service life, didn't overclock it to see what limits it had though.
I know why they made them, because they had a customer buying them by the 10s of 1000s. I used to work PC shop and the Sempy was always in the "Walmart Specials" which was a $299 PC sold at Walmart with the worst specs they could get and make a functional PC, crap monitor, minimum RAM, weak AF CPU, garbage case and the worst KB and mouse you'd ever touch. One of our biggest jobs at the time was upgrading those turds after people got tired of suffering the slowness and it would end up costing them more than if they bought a decent PC in the first place but sunk cost fallacy? it is a real thing 🤷♂
Core unlocking... That's something I haven't heard for more than 10 years. It was such a bizarre and interesting thing back in the say and definitely deserves even more FB coverage! Your unlocked core seems to have carried over full 1MB L2 cache, that might explain the poor stability.(which says the L2 cache was toast hence disabled) Which means Sempron 140 was the better buy for unlocking, for the functional 1MB L2 cache.
if only this was still an option, there are rumors that some RTX 4070ti gpus will be using defect RTX 4090 dies with defective areas fused off. imagine if you cound unlock some of those back
AMD is using internal fuses for CPU's to validate and fuse off certain parts of the CPU if they are not working as expected. This happens on the Ryzens. AMD did the locking of cores through ACC and motherboard makers where able to bypass that whole ACC by throwing in their own EC firmware codes. By activating it you would be able to unlock one, two or even 3 cores with full workings. But as you can see not all chips where fully working X2's or X4's etc - there where chips with flaws and above is one of m.
You have to appreciate AMD's philosophy in all of this though. Chip is bad? Maybe somebody can still use it. Core is bad? Enter at your own risk, but we're not going to stop you. I wish more vendors acted this way today.
There is something to be said for it, but the downside is the bottom of the barrel chips will end up in cheap PCs bought by people who don’t know what they’re getting and will likely be disappointed by the experience. Nowadays this is less of an issue as even the slowest CPUs are sufficient for daily tasks.
It sounds cool on paper but is a hell on practice, Intel Atom (yeah you said AMD i know) is a fucking trash, i barely could use one for daily drive around a decade ago, even when the manufacture date said it was made like 4 years ago (2010) it was still struggling to run Google chrome
I ran a Celeron D overclocked to 5.15ghz 24/7 from it's stock 2.93ghz for about a year until the motherboard broke. In the winter, I would put the pc tower on the window shelf, the pc tower fit perfectly with the window open. Free cooling! lol!
These old semprons were fantastic for if you ran multiple computers in the house before virtualisation. I used to build sempron servers for home tasks like fileservers and stuff that didnt require a lot of processing because the CPU's were less than $50 and a mobo could be had for about the same price
@@Loanshark753x86 hardware virtualization has existed since 2005 for Intel and 2006 for AMD, but it wasn't widespread until a few years later. Back then, VMs were sloooooow since programs like VMware used emulation. On the Linux side, we did have containerization technologies like Linux-VServer and OpenVZ, which were what we used before LXC. It's amazing how far we've come. These days we can even virtualize GPUs (even Intel iGPUs!) using SR-IOV, letting multiple VMs use the GPU at the same time.
@@Daniel15au There are some Patches to be merged on QEMU that enable Venus graphics, basically vendor-agnostic(only mesa drivers support it for now tho) vulkan passtrough (from my testings, performance is near native, very different from virgl, for example), so now we can even paravirtualize graphics without any help of GVT-g or SR-IOV.
I opened my first repair shop in 2002. Your videos bring me back to my early days of selling custom builds! I just got an AMD Geode build back in for recycle I built for a customers office PC around 2004-2005. I did a video on the CPU and the build, then reused the case for a server build for the shop.
Does Geode require windows drivers to "start working"? I have an Raon Everun UMPC that thas Geode2 and it took minutes to boot up and when the windows driver loaded, it became useful. Maybe i should find out what kinda Linux support it has, can't be worse...... Im serious, never-ever experinced a worse CPU.
@@woldemunster9244 those are the original Cytix Geodes. I never played with them. When AMD bought the Geode line they did keep making the Cyrix based hardware for embedded lower power applications all the way to 2019. However the ones I sold were the NX line. Which were rebadged, refined, more power efficient Athlon XP silicon. Released as the Geode NX series to compete with the Via C3 for low power office PCs.
AMD was known to disable fully working chips to make lower core count chips. It's why so many core unlocker boards exist. Unfortunately, you did not get one.
Depends a bit. Some sempron models were way more likely to unlock satisfactorily than others, and athlon was the same way. I don't know/remember that particular model, but at the time some models were getting better than 80% unlocked to quad cores with enough stability for home use. You wouldn't want to run all of them unlocked for extremely critical sensitive stuff but I had an athlon that unlocked and was running a persistent game server for years. It did get a weekly reboot and update anywhere from 5 minutes to a 45 minute downtime and I had a handful of freezes or blue screens in the 30 months or so that was there, but it was very reliable for a 2005-2012 time frame windows based machine. Part of the time it was even being used as a daily browsing machine while that was in the background.
I used a 3.0Ghz Phenom II X2 unlocked and overclocked to a Phenom II X3 3.6Ghz from around late 2009 to late 2015, then other people used it until about 2020. At first I ran it as a stock dual core because unlocking to a quad failed, and unlocking core number 3 failed (bad L2 I think). Much later on I realized I could try enabling cores 1, 2, and 4, which worked, so I upgraded the stock HSF and bumped the multiplier up 20%. The performance difference was massive and kept it usable for a long time. Definitely my best
Fun fact: there are two Athlon II desktop AM3 chips that are actually *worse* than every desktop AM3 Sempron except for the 130 you reviewed - those being the Athlon II 160u and 170u, clocking in at 1.8 and 2GHz respectively. They were often found in cheap HP desktops from 2010 and had 1MB L2 cache and a reduced 20W TDP, so they at least had those going for it (not the fact they were found in cheap minitower HP desktops, lol)
Scheduling and software was significantly different then as well. That would have been a machine likely to get XP or 7 out of the box not 10, (I am purposely forgetting Vista kinda for the lolz it actually got pretty decent towards the end of it's life lifecycle).
I had a Sempron. It was with the first PC I created. I got it with a motherboard deal at REPC in Seattle, for the same cost as a CPU cooler. I loved that place.
Sometimes the algorithm’s current pushes in a good direction for a change. Obscure, informative and concise. Subscribed! Here’s to diving into your back catalog, and hoping for more in the future. Cheers! 😊
I thought you were going to talk about the Sempron 145 at first, since that seemed to be the last one that was of note, and one I happen to have on hand. I would have considered trying to use it for a Windows 98se overkill build; however, the requisite board that would still have an AGP slot is next to impossible to find on ebay, and since AM3 was backwards compatible to support DDR2, even finding low-capacity ddr2 memory is a challenge.
Would have been nice if you could get a sample that unlocked, follow up maybe? might be better to do a retrospective on all the unlocks if you can collect them all. OEM only 640T is the athon quad that unlocks to hex core phenom.
Thanks! I have an X6 1090T (which I used to install Windows and apps) which I want to feature, but I did also think of doing a video just on core unlocking :)
These chips weren't meant for gaming on Steam AAA titles, but really just for systems that are mainly used for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. I used to use Sempron 145s and 140s as CPUs for file servers in the mid 2010s, as they performed better than P4s while running cooler. Also, I found that good single core performance was more important than overall multithread performance like you might get from contemporary dual core, multithread Intel Atoms. Semprons fit those needs nicely, and I only outgrew the single core's capabilities when I wanted to do ZFS compression and virtual machines on the file server..
I bought one of these chips in 2012-2013 because it was ridiculously cheap on clearance. I think I only paid $40 for it at the time and another $45-50 for a Foxconn AM3 motherboard. These Sempron 130 chips had a trick up their sleeve, many of them were in fact dual core parts with one locked core. Mine unlocked to an Athlon II x2 4300e. It performed well as a general purpose desktop machine for probably 7 years before it got blown up by a lightning strike. The motherboard was smoked, but the CPU still survived and is sitting in my CPU drawer.
Did you have a surge suppressor or did it get past that? I just put a lot into some upgrades on my rig and this is one of my fears so I bought a new surge suppressor also but I hear sometimes they don't work. I've never been around a lightning strike.
@@davel4030 Surge came in through the Ethernet port and blew a crater in the motherboard. Mains surge protectors are generally worthless regardless, because the only thing they do is put MOVs between the equipment and the mains. Power spikes easily burn them and they just keep on conducting. To have real protection, you need a double conversion UPS, where the powered equipment never sees the mains, as well as lightning suppressors on the network equipment. Lightning suppressors use gas discharge tubes to ground. Once they start conducting, they become the lowest impedance path to ground and the surge goes through them instead of the equipment. There was neither on the motherboard that got blown up, the company that was using it was too cheap to install it. A good UPS and an Ethernet lightning suppressor only costs around $400.
anything sargas was a failed regor bin. in other words: *every* single core sempron from that era was a dual core chip, but how well the second core actually worked varied.
I had a dual core Phenom which unlocked to four cores. The only problem was that it drew 170w of power which I didn't have the cooling for. In those days no-one, except maybe extreme overclockers, imagined having to cool 170w of cpu.
The performance reminded me of an old setup i had that basically ran things roughly the same. Also your commentary is amazing, im dropping you a sub for that
I still have the setup around and running after so many years, managed to unlock the Sempron 145 to a dual Athlon x2 clocked at 2.2 Ghz. This brings back memories.
I'd guessed 9 ½ minutes. I wasn't quite expecting it to be double that xD When I was around 14, i used to always see these Semprons on Amazon for around £19. I was always really curious how they performed, having always been a curious nerd. This video satisfied my curiosity.
Once you went multicore there was no going back, the Athlon 64 X2 was one of PCs greatest generational rifts of all time. I don't even remember when was the last time I ever used a single core, it must have been our HP family computer from back in 2005. Nowadays my own computer rocks a Ryzen 5 5600.
The core unlocking part really made me wish I didn't sell my Phenom II x3 720, that was stable with the 4th core unlocked. It was a fun system to mess with. I even lapped the CPU heatsink to expose the copper for extra heat transfer for the heatsink. AMD was struggling when sandybridge came out, but it was still a fun system to work with.
Awesome video man, and the ds made my day. I only tested one single core cpu in my life and it was a pentium 4 ht that I ended up replacing for a NAS build.
I owned a Sempron 140. Originally I intended to replace it after I confirmed my basic setup. But I found it to be ok for what I did back then. And while I failed to unlock the second core, as well as failing to make it clock higher, it did undervolt like crazy. I got it to run stable below 1V. Which meant I could run it passively cooled with the amd stock cooler.
Those load times brought me back. My old shared computers in my parents house were just as slow. Putting this on an HDD which is all you had back then exacerbates these load times massively. The reason people left their PCs on sometimes is that it could take upwards of a half an hour to get to a desktop and even then, you were not likely doing much yet waiting on startup apps and what have you. Overclocking also had a much different connotation then it does now. Diminishing returns is more what OC-ing is anymore today, but bumping a processor up 1GHz or more back then could yield impressive gains. Modern chips are already pushed right to the upper limits out of the box and they do it automatically.
Back in the days i used to own (i still have it, just not rly using it) a Sempron 140 pc, recently found out about the second core in the chip, so I've bought a new motherboard that supports the UCC feature and unlocked my Sempron 140 with 3.6 Ghz. It was still pretty awful and faced some inconvenience during the time I was testing it, but man, I enjoyed every minute of it, the games I used to play as a child with 10-15 fps was amazing with 30-60 fps on the same old nostalgic setup, amazing video man ❤️
The CPU core unlocking was quite fun when it worked. Unlocking cheapo triplecore Athlon II X3 CPUs into Phenom II X4s and having them be fully functional (including extra L3 cache) was mindboggling. Almost the same level of dopamine rush when it turns out to be working as being able to successfully OC a cheap C2D E4300 from a measly 1.8GHz to 3.6GHz and it runs stable no matter what you throw at it, while having literally _doubled_ the clockspeed so it plays in the same league as CPUs that cost triple the amount. Sad that fun stuff like this will likely never happen again
I still fondly remember my Athlon XP-M (a mobile binned socket CPU), which run easily at +40% OC. Not to be outdone, the Core 2 Duo that followed it, managed almost +60% OC.
Back in the day, I bought 4 Athlon 2 x3 cpus and 3 of them unlocked in some way. One of them unlocked into a full blown Phenom 2 x4 with all the extra cache. One unlocked into an x4 chip, and the third one I only got the extra cache so it became a phenom 2 x3. After i bought the 4th one and nothing unlocked I stopped buying them. I miss those days.
I once bought a AMD Phenom II X2 565 BE Dualcore, thankfully I had am Asus Board with Core-unlock. My intention was to unlock it to a quadcore, but only one hidden core worked. So it became a tripplecore CPU. Still works fine after years.
It was actually a clever bit of marketing. In the early days, chips that failed dual core, but the single core still worked, would be sold as a single core cpu. The 130 was probably just a 140 or 150, that failed the cache test
The whole cache argument is a bit out there because the vast majority of end users outside of power users, enthusiasts and developers don't even know what cache is, let alone what it does. That loading time for GTA V is about as much time it took for the Pentium 75 PC with 32 MB of RAM and 2 GB of storage to boot into Windows XP. It also took 3 hours to install.
Sempron was just like intel's celeron with cutted or often halved cache. It was good for business applications, your avg word, internet explorer but anything serious would often lack compared to it's full 1MB counterpart.
Nice review. I had the 140, unlocked it to X2 from first boot and ran it at 3700 MHz. It was quite an upgrade from my previous Venice 3200+ Those CPUs were ok in 2010. Today (14 years later) we have a ton of JavaScript on every web page, games are multithreaded, so old hardware got old.
It does kinda make sense that these were a thing in 2011. Theyre intended to be used in low demand office situations, sending emails, writing up documents, very light 2011 browsing. The manager of the place doesnt care if their employees are pulling their hair out
Love the Dell OEM keyboard and mouse. Paired with every OptiPlex for literally a decade before thin clients became the norm. Would love a 5:4 Dell ultrasharp screen with it! Those had actually better backlighting than many modern monitors.
the answer to `What made them go "I know what consumers would really appreciate"` is that they had a stock off cpu's that had defects that affected max speed and/or cache. They don't want to sit on a bunch of unsold silicon after 2 years of manufacturing wavers with defects and try to sell them a little bit cheaper.
I bought an Athlon II X3 455 in 2012 and I was able to unlock the 4th core on a very cheap ASROCK Motherboard, which turned it into a perfectly functional never released Phenom II X4 B55. I could even overclock it to 3.6 GHz and I remember playing Far Cry 5 with like 40-50 fps on average.
I know how poorly this 512kB cache looks like but it's probably not out of pure spite, just fusing off the half with a defect. Still the CPU turns out to be a spectacular nugget - with the cache so small, the instruction pipeline is probably starved most of the time! Thanks for sharing :)
i remember this last run of semprons. the motherboards were also cheap that they made sense to build machines with them for a karaoke or a simple task pc that must run windows 7 or 8. kinda like what we do for arm sbc this days.
Asking why this was "released to consumers" is fundamentally flawed. The Phenom chips are mostly found in data-entry applications in the commercial sector. Bar code scanning stations in warehouses, front desk computers in receptions, etc. AMD "had" to release them into the normal retail channels to target system integrators, as they didn't have much weight with the big OEMs. I have actually built quite a few such systems in my time.
Heres a story inspired by the Celeron video which pushed me to explore the single core AMD Sargas chips much further, in fact after a bundle from a scrap lot, bending some pins and a handful from a fellow XOC friend, i had a few open box and sealed ones (which happened to be a numbers maching pair, 57 and 58, which i have dare not opened. After a 3400+ 939 system with an X1950, 1650, 2600XT, popping in a 4200+ for some tests, i came across a gold nugget in the dirt, amongst the scrap lot was an X2 4800+ the fastest 939 offering, the pins came back perfectly and it indeed worked. But for the XP games, 2 cores was pointless, HT is what you wanted and while almost going for the celeron option, my roots with my first PC were AMD and an nvidia card. Another friend turned out to have a motherboard i forgot i long lusted after (as i was the weird one who drooled over a a strong bored and potato CPU.) The Foxconn Destroyer. With AM2+ and a Bios update i now had an AM3 Sempron 150 at 4Ghz (young me thought i could unlock the CPU if i needed a dual core down the line, not with this board :P) But in MW2005 amongst other NFS titles, they were able to take advantage of the X2 4200+ performance, but on one core, but i found that the high 20s low 30s in tough areas only raised into the low 40s, surely there was more peformance in it, the 2600XT just wasn't enough with the slow downs. From that same friend they chucked in an ATi HD4870, the baller card that reminded me of that original ATi lust, Crossfire, Foxconn Destroyer, Dual channel (as they were only capable of this on AM2+ with its DDR2 controller.) I knew that card was overkill, but was sad to see the iceQ card i loved just half the framerate of what the 4870/50 i later got was capable of. It however ran warmer than i had liked and just drew power pointlessly. I then remembered the cooler i had put on it was a match made in heaven for a Zotac 9800GT that for some reason has the best mount ever, at idle it sits in the high teens and mid 20s under load, the original slim flower cooler from Zotac producing high 30s idle and mid 50s under load. Faulty T sensor i thought but nope..performance was a hair worse but i could run the fans silent across the whole system. Not too long ago i found the case i'd have used if i had upgraded, a CM Elite 330, it felt wrong having an athlon when my roots were with a sempron and my first PC i felt needed to have my first PC components back inside, now that i had found an Xpert Vision FX5900XT and 6600XT, the 2 cards i wanted back with that system and an athlon 64 3000 or 3200+ i can finally see what differences it would have made and if that 2800+ had more to give. I always wanted a UV theme back then and after spending way too much on some new old stock UV fans, the whole system was now decked out with them after i found a Scythe Mugen 2 Rev B, the mount was a little sketchy but works. The motherboard sadly hits an FSB wall i haven't been able to get past and these chips with a good bin can reach the mid 4s, but as it stands, the poorly optimised games now run above the monitor's 75Hz refresh rate and in those Unreal engine titles, the framerates are silly high. The last thing i need to explore is Vista that enables the use of Hybrid SLi, the dGPU on the board is derived from 8400GS silicon and with such a card in the system can enable one of the poorer SLi combos but would be amusing to explore, definitely worth a HWbot submission :P
3:17 *AMD Sempron - 16GB RAM DDR3* During the Sempron era, it was much more common to use DDR2. Those that could afford a mobo with DDR3 support, most likely would also upgrade to some cpu Phenom (X4 or X6).
Sempron was analog to the Celeron, thankfully back in 2007 when my mom's colleague from work was helping choosing parts for my build we went to Athlon X2.
Very cool Sargas chip. Those were 1c/1t and shipped out 15 years ago + 1 week. 2.7GHz was quite a jump compared to the Lima chip that I daily in my server: Athlon 2650e. Another 1c/1t unit but 1.6GHz and capped at a grand total of 15W. Doesn't hold a candle to the Phenom II X4 system I built the same year but that also seems to be the entire point. There is a weird need for these single core systems lately and it's mostly for software compatibility and high availability servers that need to sip power. 2GB DDR2 is abysmal but does the job. If you want better performance out of that Sempron you might be better off sticking to one DIMM per channel. There have always been issues with dual sets of memory in that time period.
You have to keep in mind that single board computers and low end systems are often used in industrial/commercial situations. I can't speak for today but as of 2012 there was still a lot of billion dollar industries that ran their systems on Pentium/Pentium 2 era hardware and DOS apps with keypads and tiny CRTs as the interface. There was still a market for single threaded CPUs for situations like that, though IO becomes the issue then. Most of these old machines connected over serial, which is becoming more difficult to get. When you're talking about a $10K lathe or a $1 million box cutter, you figure out how to keep old tech alive.
Great video! I always enjoy seeing some of the more obscure products coming to light, even if it's just for testing purposes. AMD probably just wanted what money they could get from all their products, and for the time, these probably still would have been fine for applications that simply didn't need the extra compute. After all, there where still A LOT of applications that just didn't take advantage of extra cores and threads back then.
Somewhere I've got a Sempron 145 which did unlock great to a dual core. Have had it in my home server running 24/7 for almost 2 years. Never crashed. I don't remember how high it did OC but hey, it got eventually replaced with a Phenom II quad core.
Back in the day, I got a Sempron 145 for a MoBo that was left behind after an upgrade that I turned into a storage server. The moment I installed it in the socket and turned the PC on, I was greated in the BIOS with the invitation to unlock it. I did that and found out that it actually had 2MB of cache and identified itself as an Athlon X2 245. Ran like that for a few years until I retired it to storage, with the purpose of one day building a Win98 machine with it, if I find DDR3 modules that are small; like 2x256MB or 1x512MB at most.
I've run across these and other Semprons in scrapped PC's typically recovered from minority and generally poor neighborhoods. They were "popular" in super low budget systems and marketed to folks that didn't know what a CPU was and thought they were getting a bargain. They could do dial up e-mail and very basic web browsing, but most of the folks that bought them never even did that much with them. They might even be paired with Windows ME for a better experience. Of note, it is surprising how many of these salvage systems came in still in good working condition. It's like they were never used by anyone. I know I have at least one Sempron system left under a pile of pulled 486's and P90's,
They cleaned out our library at Loyola one night. Switched every 166 for a 133 right after they came out. They actually took the time to replace the chips. One computer didn't boot and we found out that day.
Loved the Sempron. The pricing was perfect for a struggling college student and the fact that it was AM3 meant at the time I could always upgrade to something better later. Just had to dumpster dive for the rest of the PC.
I don't know that I'd have ever classified these as a 'consumer' chip- they're more like the cheapest possible CPU you can get for passive rigs that don't use the CPU. Pair this with a 4090 or 2 (or other powerful GPUs) then turn it into a rig that only uses the GPU for AI models, hashing/mining or just general number crunching that only uses the GPU. There's a use case for this, but it's not as a regular PC, I suspect most who bought these bought in bulk and that extra 10-20 dollars adds up when you're maybe buying hundreds of them at a time. You'd have a many of these PC's, then a more standard PC that you'd use to remotely control them and sync up the GPUs to work together- I've never done this before but some of my Friends have had some really strange setups like what I mentioned.
Good video but on the gaming benchmarks you should have chose older games from the time the chip came out 2011 and before, but other than that great video.
In hindsight I would have wanted to add some older titles. My thinking was that most budget chips from 2011 would have been able to provide a basic experience in these newer titles, but I had perhaps overestimated this chip lol
AMD in those days took binning to the extreme. If a CPU was defective but would work in any configuration at all, they would sell it. They would sell an X6 part as a Sempron if one of the six cores would work at a salable price. But those were still just barely good enough for everyday tasks in 2011. I never bought one, because even if I were building someone a basic PC, a dual-core Athlon wasn't much more and would sometimes unlock to a Phenom II and work fine. One thing I know the Semprons were used for is that some high-end motherboards refused to initialize a CPU that came out after the board did; you couldn't even flash an updated BIOS. But the Sempron would always be recognized and allow you to flash.
They where paying per wafer - so lets say you can get X amount of fully good working dies out of it, and X / X / X amount of half, quarter functional dies out of it. You obviously don't throw the half working dies away - you fuse these off either through BIOS (firmware) or as of today with hardware fuses and sell them for lower priced parts. This way nothing gets lost.
I had an sempron before I got my first athlon and then phenom. It was my first cpu I overclocked and the performance increase was really great. This cpu got me into overclocking and pc's in general.
I have a Sempron 140 and 145 at home, both can unlock the extra core and they work flawlessly. I also have an Athlon II x2 (or Phenom II x2, not sure anymore) that fully unlocks to 4 cores and 6MB of cache and the improvement is staggering.
Back in the day it took me multiple minutes to load every race on nfs most wanted with 256mb ram. Finally saved up for a 1gb stick of ram and put it in and it loaded like 10x faster
Windows 8 actually runs VERY well with Single-Core CPUs like this. I have an old laptop with a Pentium M 1.6GHz and 2GB DDR1 RAM in it, and it runs Windows 8 rather easily; I can play OG Runescape on it with the ATi X1300 graphics!
I remember the last updates for GTA V for the X360 were bringing the poor console to it's knees. Startup was around 10min and it crashed a lot in Online. Good times😅
4:15 To truly test at what resolution is YT playback still acceptable, you have to make the video fullscreen and the monitor is have to be at that resolution too. Otherwise it's scaled down video, which runs smoother than it would on real 1080p resolution.
Honestly... I've always wondered if this is just placebo effect but... we got along with single core/1 (sometimes 2 I guess with HT) thread for a long time, I realise that applications were less demanding then but... a fast single core chip in the late 90s/early 00's seemed to cope fine with some pretty heavy multitasking. I guess OS's changed though, Windows 10 certainly won't be made with this configuration in mind and neither is anything else. Modern websites are definitely heavier but does sort of make you wonder just how much power we're wasting, the very idea of needing multiple cores just to smoothly browse the average website would seem quite ludicrous in the 2000-2006 sort of era, well into "web 2.0" days with all the extra demands it placed upon systems.
True - I have the suspicion a lot of websites and software have become unnecessarily bloated - especially with advertising, tracking, embedded videos and so on... Windows XP on a hard drive wasn't necessarily slow, but now you can use Windows 11 with an NVMe drive and still have it feeling sluggish.
![[TF2] The Russian Bear Trap](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YFNSwz2_rOA/mqdefault.jpg)
that GPU is being choked to death, 0% utilisation lol
it's like strapping a jet engine to a toy train
@@gamelaine I'm surprised GTA didn't pop up and say "you have GOT to be kidding me!"
Chock
and 6mhz where so fckin wild bro
@@gamelaine its like trying to swim on space
I remember seeing these on Amazon back in the introduction of the FX era.
I nearly bought one purely because all the reviews said I could unlock that second core… I ended up spending an extra £20 and got an FX4300.
That GTA V loading actually is the only thing I’ve ever seen come to a Celeron D in load times. Wow.
Loved the video man 👍
Did that with the Phenom X3, turns out not all 3 core chips was in fact perfectly fine 4 cores, cut down to meet demand, as many internet forums were claiming, the 4th core was never entirely stable. Did run it as a 4 core for a while, but if I wanted stability I either had to underclock it, or revert to 3 cores.
@@ZnakeTech yeah I tried it with an Athlon II x3 (which we referred to as a cripple core processor instead of triple core) and no dice either. I’ve seen people do it successfully though. Even a Phenom II X2 that unlocked to X4 and the X4 T Phenoms that were secretly X6s.
Thanks man! As bad as Bulldozer was, an FX4300 was the right call for an extra 20 pounds...
@@ZnakeTech The way I heard reviewers explain things like this is it's a gamble. But, kind of in reverse if you bought it expecting it to be as labeled. Just with a hidden bonus if you can make it work as originally spec'd. Sometimes a chip had defects but was fine after being modded to lower spec, sometimes it was perfectly fine but features disabled to fill demand for lower spec.
Core unlocking was very common back then and especially later on in the life cycle (when yields were better) of the single and triple cores a gamble some were willing to take when on a tight budget. It was an interesting time.
I bought one of these chips in 2011 for one specific reason: I bought an AM3 board for a computer build I'd saved up for, and found out after putting it together to test, that couldn't boot Piledriver CPUs without a BIOS update. it was cheaper and quicker to get the Sempron 130 than to RMA the board.
Haha amazing, thanks for sharing
Thats the reason this chit was released. though I believe the Idea was so that shops could do the updating without having to put a more expansive cpu on the line, people did also buy them to play around with.
Reminds me of when the K6-2 400 came out - BEFORE MS had support for the CPU baked into windows. We LITERALLY had to UNDERCLOCK the CPU to 300 MHZ, install Windows, install a patch made by AMD, THEN return the clock speed to 400!
or you could've just updated the BIOS 😇
@@KalakCZ how do you update a bios when the system won't boot with the CPU. that was the problem. people bought a new motherboard with cpu and it couldn't boot.
There was a point where Microcenter was selling those for 5 dollars. Most wound up being used for testing, linux boxes doing small tasks or monitoring.
For 5 dollars, you can't go wrong for a new CPU
This makes a ton of sense in the days before raspberry pi's
@@CameronVanNatta And today to... Raspberry Pi is not cheap compared to refurbished or "new old stock".
Unless you want energy efficiency, then the pi zeros and picos are great!
@@Jossandoval yeah, zero and pico for little tinkering is great.
But if you wanna buy pi 4 pi 5 for homelab or doing smth more, at that point just grab some used Intel gen6 mini pc.
@@jnhkx Yep, these days you can get quad cores for dirt cheap.
Amd has one of the coolest naming scheme, Ryzen, Sempron, Phenom, Athlon, Epyc, Threadripper, Radeon, Vega. Not to mention their code names so much better than the lake code names of intel.
Agreed, Intel’s naming scheme is a mess nowadays
Intel had a good naming scheme before. now its rather strange. but i absolutely ADORE the AMD namings of APU nowadays, which are all dedicated to Final Fantasy seies (like Arieth and Sephiroth APUs in Steam Deck, Oryon and Scarlett in Xbox / PS and so on). they have almost all Final Fantasy heroes in their lineups now
while i agree, we have to admit Raptor Cove is a killer name
@@FullyBufferedwhat you don't want a chip called bottom of the rust lake?
Like what is the intel core ultra 7???
I remember unlocking these cpu's, it wasn't lowering clock speed that usually got them to work, it was putting a LOT of voltage through them. Your mileage may vary.
I got lucky with my 130, it just worked with only being unlocked. Ran stable for its entire service life, didn't overclock it to see what limits it had though.
Playing with voltage and timings were for sure the ways to figure out an overclock, but sometimes the motherboard just wouldn't play along either.
I’ve still got a 2.8 GHz single core FX-57 with a x1950 Pro AGP :)
Nice! Great combo :)
I know why they made them, because they had a customer buying them by the 10s of 1000s. I used to work PC shop and the Sempy was always in the "Walmart Specials" which was a $299 PC sold at Walmart with the worst specs they could get and make a functional PC, crap monitor, minimum RAM, weak AF CPU, garbage case and the worst KB and mouse you'd ever touch.
One of our biggest jobs at the time was upgrading those turds after people got tired of suffering the slowness and it would end up costing them more than if they bought a decent PC in the first place but sunk cost fallacy? it is a real thing 🤷♂
It's so funny to me that the GPU is so underutilized that the fans on it aren't even spinning while playing GTA 5
Core unlocking... That's something I haven't heard for more than 10 years.
It was such a bizarre and interesting thing back in the say and definitely deserves even more FB coverage!
Your unlocked core seems to have carried over full 1MB L2 cache, that might explain the poor stability.(which says the L2 cache was toast hence disabled)
Which means Sempron 140 was the better buy for unlocking, for the functional 1MB L2 cache.
if only this was still an option, there are rumors that some RTX 4070ti gpus will be using defect RTX 4090 dies with defective areas fused off. imagine if you cound unlock some of those back
AMD is using internal fuses for CPU's to validate and fuse off certain parts of the CPU if they are not working as expected. This happens on the Ryzens. AMD did the locking of cores through ACC and motherboard makers where able to bypass that whole ACC by throwing in their own EC firmware codes. By activating it you would be able to unlock one, two or even 3 cores with full workings. But as you can see not all chips where fully working X2's or X4's etc - there where chips with flaws and above is one of m.
You have to appreciate AMD's philosophy in all of this though. Chip is bad? Maybe somebody can still use it. Core is bad? Enter at your own risk, but we're not going to stop you.
I wish more vendors acted this way today.
There is something to be said for it, but the downside is the bottom of the barrel chips will end up in cheap PCs bought by people who don’t know what they’re getting and will likely be disappointed by the experience. Nowadays this is less of an issue as even the slowest CPUs are sufficient for daily tasks.
Now intel is doing the thing with 13rd and 14th gen core I cpus :D
It sounds cool on paper but is a hell on practice, Intel Atom (yeah you said AMD i know) is a fucking trash, i barely could use one for daily drive around a decade ago, even when the manufacture date said it was made like 4 years ago (2010) it was still struggling to run Google chrome
The semprons were always known to overclock like absolute kings...!
celeron 300a enters the chat
I ran a Celeron D overclocked to 5.15ghz 24/7 from it's stock 2.93ghz for about a year until the motherboard broke. In the winter, I would put the pc tower on the window shelf, the pc tower fit perfectly with the window open. Free cooling! lol!
@@JSparrowist That was a cheap 150Mhz increase - a good sempron would easily do 1.5 Ghz.
I had a celery 366a oc to 550mhz back in the day.great chip for 120 cdn back in the day.
@@vanderlinde4you g3258 enters the chat. I had one stable at 4.5ghz.
I got flashbacks to my teenself in the 80s waiting more than 5 minutes for games to load from a cassette on my Spectrum +2.
Nice haha
These old semprons were fantastic for if you ran multiple computers in the house before virtualisation. I used to build sempron servers for home tasks like fileservers and stuff that didnt require a lot of processing because the CPU's were less than $50 and a mobo could be had for about the same price
Interesting use case! Thanks for sharing
Did hw virtualization exist?
@@Loanshark753x86 hardware virtualization has existed since 2005 for Intel and 2006 for AMD, but it wasn't widespread until a few years later. Back then, VMs were sloooooow since programs like VMware used emulation.
On the Linux side, we did have containerization technologies like Linux-VServer and OpenVZ, which were what we used before LXC.
It's amazing how far we've come. These days we can even virtualize GPUs (even Intel iGPUs!) using SR-IOV, letting multiple VMs use the GPU at the same time.
@@Daniel15au There are some Patches to be merged on QEMU that enable Venus graphics, basically vendor-agnostic(only mesa drivers support it for now tho) vulkan passtrough (from my testings, performance is near native, very different from virgl, for example), so now we can even paravirtualize graphics without any help of GVT-g or SR-IOV.
I opened my first repair shop in 2002. Your videos bring me back to my early days of selling custom builds! I just got an AMD Geode build back in for recycle I built for a customers office PC around 2004-2005. I did a video on the CPU and the build, then reused the case for a server build for the shop.
Thanks for sharing!
Does Geode require windows drivers to "start working"?
I have an Raon Everun UMPC that thas Geode2 and it took minutes to boot up and when the windows driver loaded, it became useful.
Maybe i should find out what kinda Linux support it has, can't be worse...... Im serious, never-ever experinced a worse CPU.
@@woldemunster9244 those are the original Cytix Geodes. I never played with them. When AMD bought the Geode line they did keep making the Cyrix based hardware for embedded lower power applications all the way to 2019. However the ones I sold were the NX line. Which were rebadged, refined, more power efficient Athlon XP silicon. Released as the Geode NX series to compete with the Via C3 for low power office PCs.
@@JordosTechShack Via mentioned... oh noes, now i get it :D
AMD was known to disable fully working chips to make lower core count chips. It's why so many core unlocker boards exist. Unfortunately, you did not get one.
I was a bit sad about that, the performance would have been significantly better
The Semprom 130 only exists because of the faulty units produced. There's no unlocking in faulty parts of a chip to be done.
@@JAnx01 yes there is
Depends a bit. Some sempron models were way more likely to unlock satisfactorily than others, and athlon was the same way. I don't know/remember that particular model, but at the time some models were getting better than 80% unlocked to quad cores with enough stability for home use. You wouldn't want to run all of them unlocked for extremely critical sensitive stuff but I had an athlon that unlocked and was running a persistent game server for years. It did get a weekly reboot and update anywhere from 5 minutes to a 45 minute downtime and I had a handful of freezes or blue screens in the 30 months or so that was there, but it was very reliable for a 2005-2012 time frame windows based machine. Part of the time it was even being used as a daily browsing machine while that was in the background.
I used a 3.0Ghz Phenom II X2 unlocked and overclocked to a Phenom II X3 3.6Ghz from around late 2009 to late 2015, then other people used it until about 2020. At first I ran it as a stock dual core because unlocking to a quad failed, and unlocking core number 3 failed (bad L2 I think). Much later on I realized I could try enabling cores 1, 2, and 4, which worked, so I upgraded the stock HSF and bumped the multiplier up 20%. The performance difference was massive and kept it usable for a long time. Definitely my best
Awesome, always great to get so many years of use out of a CPU
AM3 CPU unlocking is awesome, managed to unlock a Phenom II X2 565 into a X4. Not bad for what's basically a free computer after selling the PSU lol
Nice! That's a great unlock
I love how informative your videos are. Please make more.
Thank you!
Regards to GTA V loading time - I predict 15 minutes 😀
Edit - oh ffs.
Thanks for the comment! You were not that far off haha
for some reason i found this video very entertaining this morning lol... good job man i hope your channel grows extremely fast....
Many thanks for the kind words :) please do share this video with people who might like it
Fun fact: there are two Athlon II desktop AM3 chips that are actually *worse* than every desktop AM3 Sempron except for the 130 you reviewed - those being the Athlon II 160u and 170u, clocking in at 1.8 and 2GHz respectively. They were often found in cheap HP desktops from 2010 and had 1MB L2 cache and a reduced 20W TDP, so they at least had those going for it (not the fact they were found in cheap minitower HP desktops, lol)
Oof yeah those sound particularly dreadful as well.
The last single core I've used was an Athlon LE for AM2+, that wasn't half bad! Powered my first NAS.
I can imagine they would have been sufficient for such a use case
Scheduling and software was significantly different then as well. That would have been a machine likely to get XP or 7 out of the box not 10, (I am purposely forgetting Vista kinda for the lolz it actually got pretty decent towards the end of it's life lifecycle).
Great video! I'm looking forward to your next test of weirdly interesting hardware! 😄
Thanks for the kinds words! :)
I had a Sempron. It was with the first PC I created. I got it with a motherboard deal at REPC in Seattle, for the same cost as a CPU cooler. I loved that place.
Same cost as a CPU cooler :D
Sometimes the algorithm’s current pushes in a good direction for a change. Obscure, informative and concise. Subscribed!
Here’s to diving into your back catalog, and hoping for more in the future. Cheers! 😊
Thank you for the kind words, I’m glad to hear! :)
I thought you were going to talk about the Sempron 145 at first, since that seemed to be the last one that was of note, and one I happen to have on hand. I would have considered trying to use it for a Windows 98se overkill build; however, the requisite board that would still have an AGP slot is next to impossible to find on ebay, and since AM3 was backwards compatible to support DDR2, even finding low-capacity ddr2 memory is a challenge.
Would have been nice if you could get a sample that unlocked, follow up maybe? might be better to do a retrospective on all the unlocks if you can collect them all. OEM only 640T is the athon quad that unlocks to hex core phenom.
Thanks! I have an X6 1090T (which I used to install Windows and apps) which I want to feature, but I did also think of doing a video just on core unlocking :)
These chips weren't meant for gaming on Steam AAA titles, but really just for systems that are mainly used for word processing, spreadsheets, etc.
I used to use Sempron 145s and 140s as CPUs for file servers in the mid 2010s, as they performed better than P4s while running cooler. Also, I found that good single core performance was more important than overall multithread performance like you might get from contemporary dual core, multithread Intel Atoms. Semprons fit those needs nicely, and I only outgrew the single core's capabilities when I wanted to do ZFS compression and virtual machines on the file server..
I bought one of these chips in 2012-2013 because it was ridiculously cheap on clearance. I think I only paid $40 for it at the time and another $45-50 for a Foxconn AM3 motherboard.
These Sempron 130 chips had a trick up their sleeve, many of them were in fact dual core parts with one locked core. Mine unlocked to an Athlon II x2 4300e. It performed well as a general purpose desktop machine for probably 7 years before it got blown up by a lightning strike. The motherboard was smoked, but the CPU still survived and is sitting in my CPU drawer.
Did you have a surge suppressor or did it get past that? I just put a lot into some upgrades on my rig and this is one of my fears so I bought a new surge suppressor also but I hear sometimes they don't work. I've never been around a lightning strike.
@@davel4030 Surge came in through the Ethernet port and blew a crater in the motherboard.
Mains surge protectors are generally worthless regardless, because the only thing they do is put MOVs between the equipment and the mains. Power spikes easily burn them and they just keep on conducting.
To have real protection, you need a double conversion UPS, where the powered equipment never sees the mains, as well as lightning suppressors on the network equipment. Lightning suppressors use gas discharge tubes to ground. Once they start conducting, they become the lowest impedance path to ground and the surge goes through them instead of the equipment.
There was neither on the motherboard that got blown up, the company that was using it was too cheap to install it. A good UPS and an Ethernet lightning suppressor only costs around $400.
anything sargas was a failed regor bin. in other words: *every* single core sempron from that era was a dual core chip, but how well the second core actually worked varied.
I had a dual core Phenom which unlocked to four cores. The only problem was that it drew 170w of power which I didn't have the cooling for. In those days no-one, except maybe extreme overclockers, imagined having to cool 170w of cpu.
It’s interesting to see how the consensus on CPU power has shifted over time
The performance reminded me of an old setup i had that basically ran things roughly the same.
Also your commentary is amazing, im dropping you a sub for that
Thank you! I’m glad to hear :)
I still have the setup around and running after so many years, managed to unlock the Sempron 145 to a dual Athlon x2 clocked at 2.2 Ghz. This brings back memories.
I'd guessed 9 ½ minutes. I wasn't quite expecting it to be double that xD
When I was around 14, i used to always see these Semprons on Amazon for around £19. I was always really curious how they performed, having always been a curious nerd. This video satisfied my curiosity.
Thanks for the comment! Glad to hear :)
Once you went multicore there was no going back, the Athlon 64 X2 was one of PCs greatest generational rifts of all time.
I don't even remember when was the last time I ever used a single core, it must have been our HP family computer from back in 2005.
Nowadays my own computer rocks a Ryzen 5 5600.
Thanks for the comment!
I have an OLD Dell Mini9 Netbook that uses a single core CPU and runs Windows XP on an 8GB SSD. PAINFULLY SLOW!
I cant remember clearly but i had a triple core amd cpu in a ASRock n68c-s ucc motherboard and turned it into a 6 core and it worked flawlessly
The core unlocking part really made me wish I didn't sell my Phenom II x3 720, that was stable with the 4th core unlocked. It was a fun system to mess with. I even lapped the CPU heatsink to expose the copper for extra heat transfer for the heatsink. AMD was struggling when sandybridge came out, but it was still a fun system to work with.
Nice! Love the opimization with lapping
Awesome video man, and the ds made my day. I only tested one single core cpu in my life and it was a pentium 4 ht that I ended up replacing for a NAS build.
Thank you!
Good video. Doom 2016 might work in Vulcan. It run on hyper-threaded P4's using Vulcan.
I owned a Sempron 140.
Originally I intended to replace it after I confirmed my basic setup.
But I found it to be ok for what I did back then.
And while I failed to unlock the second core, as well as failing to make it clock higher, it did undervolt like crazy. I got it to run stable below 1V.
Which meant I could run it passively cooled with the amd stock cooler.
Ha very nice, running it passively cooled with an undervolt! Thanks for sharing
Those load times brought me back. My old shared computers in my parents house were just as slow. Putting this on an HDD which is all you had back then exacerbates these load times massively.
The reason people left their PCs on sometimes is that it could take upwards of a half an hour to get to a desktop and even then, you were not likely doing much yet waiting on startup apps and what have you.
Overclocking also had a much different connotation then it does now. Diminishing returns is more what OC-ing is anymore today, but bumping a processor up 1GHz or more back then could yield impressive gains. Modern chips are already pushed right to the upper limits out of the box and they do it automatically.
miss the day when overclocking of such degree and core unlocking) was achievable.
Back in the days i used to own (i still have it, just not rly using it) a Sempron 140 pc, recently found out about the second core in the chip, so I've bought a new motherboard that supports the UCC feature and unlocked my Sempron 140 with 3.6 Ghz.
It was still pretty awful and faced some inconvenience during the time I was testing it, but man, I enjoyed every minute of it, the games I used to play as a child with 10-15 fps was amazing with 30-60 fps on the same old nostalgic setup, amazing video man ❤️
The CPU core unlocking was quite fun when it worked. Unlocking cheapo triplecore Athlon II X3 CPUs into Phenom II X4s and having them be fully functional (including extra L3 cache) was mindboggling. Almost the same level of dopamine rush when it turns out to be working as being able to successfully OC a cheap C2D E4300 from a measly 1.8GHz to 3.6GHz and it runs stable no matter what you throw at it, while having literally _doubled_ the clockspeed so it plays in the same league as CPUs that cost triple the amount. Sad that fun stuff like this will likely never happen again
I just found this channel, never know Paul atreides become a RUclipsr
I still fondly remember my Athlon XP-M (a mobile binned socket CPU), which run easily at +40% OC. Not to be outdone, the Core 2 Duo that followed it, managed almost +60% OC.
Very nice!
I had a sempron le-1250 for years, unfortunately I have only ever been able to overclock it to 2,84GHz from 2,20GHz
Back in the day, I bought 4 Athlon 2 x3 cpus and 3 of them unlocked in some way. One of them unlocked into a full blown Phenom 2 x4 with all the extra cache. One unlocked into an x4 chip, and the third one I only got the extra cache so it became a phenom 2 x3. After i bought the 4th one and nothing unlocked I stopped buying them. I miss those days.
Very cool! Interesting to hear they all unlocked in a different way.
I though bro quite the channel.
Don’t quit. Your contents are awesome
Thanks!
Nice job with the video - always fun experimenting with oddball hardware :)
Thank you! It is!
Man i keep forgetting about this channel all the time even though i really, really enjoy it, i need to sub
Thanks for the kind words, I’m glad to hear that!
my dad had a sempron 145 in a mining rig. I eventually inherited it and unlocked the second core. It made a decent web browsing computer for the time.
pulling out a nintendo ds, one of my favorite console ever, this guy has a place in my heart for playing nds games~
I once bought a AMD Phenom II X2 565 BE Dualcore, thankfully I had am Asus Board with Core-unlock.
My intention was to unlock it to a quadcore, but only one hidden core worked. So it became a tripplecore CPU.
Still works fine after years.
Nice!
@@FullyBuffered Indeed. The PC is now almost 10 years old.
Now with Linux Mint and still going.
It was actually a clever bit of marketing. In the early days, chips that failed dual core, but the single core still worked, would be sold as a single core cpu. The 130 was probably just a 140 or 150, that failed the cache test
The whole cache argument is a bit out there because the vast majority of end users outside of power users, enthusiasts and developers don't even know what cache is, let alone what it does. That loading time for GTA V is about as much time it took for the Pentium 75 PC with 32 MB of RAM and 2 GB of storage to boot into Windows XP. It also took 3 hours to install.
Sempron was just like intel's celeron with cutted or often halved cache. It was good for business applications, your avg word, internet explorer but anything serious would often lack compared to it's full 1MB counterpart.
Nice review. I had the 140, unlocked it to X2 from first boot and ran it at 3700 MHz. It was quite an upgrade from my previous Venice 3200+
Those CPUs were ok in 2010. Today (14 years later) we have a ton of JavaScript on every web page, games are multithreaded, so old hardware got old.
It does kinda make sense that these were a thing in 2011. Theyre intended to be used in low demand office situations, sending emails, writing up documents, very light 2011 browsing. The manager of the place doesnt care if their employees are pulling their hair out
Love the Dell OEM keyboard and mouse. Paired with every OptiPlex for literally a decade before thin clients became the norm. Would love a 5:4 Dell ultrasharp screen with it! Those had actually better backlighting than many modern monitors.
I've had success unlocking multiple CPUs from that era. Phenom x2 turning into x4, athlon tri cores becoming quads, etc etc. fun times.
Great video ! And this hairstyles suits you very well man !
the answer to `What made them go "I know what consumers would really appreciate"` is that they had a stock off cpu's that had defects that affected max speed and/or cache. They don't want to sit on a bunch of unsold silicon after 2 years of manufacturing wavers with defects and try to sell them a little bit cheaper.
I bought an Athlon II X3 455 in 2012 and I was able to unlock the 4th core on a very cheap ASROCK Motherboard, which turned it into a perfectly functional never released Phenom II X4 B55. I could even overclock it to 3.6 GHz and I remember playing Far Cry 5 with like 40-50 fps on average.
Nice! Thanks for sharing
I know how poorly this 512kB cache looks like but it's probably not out of pure spite, just fusing off the half with a defect. Still the CPU turns out to be a spectacular nugget - with the cache so small, the instruction pipeline is probably starved most of the time! Thanks for sharing :)
Thank you!
i remember this last run of semprons. the motherboards were also cheap that they made sense to build machines with them for a karaoke or a simple task pc that must run windows 7 or 8. kinda like what we do for arm sbc this days.
Asking why this was "released to consumers" is fundamentally flawed. The Phenom chips are mostly found in data-entry applications in the commercial sector. Bar code scanning stations in warehouses, front desk computers in receptions, etc. AMD "had" to release them into the normal retail channels to target system integrators, as they didn't have much weight with the big OEMs. I have actually built quite a few such systems in my time.
Heres a story inspired by the Celeron video which pushed me to explore the single core AMD Sargas chips much further, in fact after a bundle from a scrap lot, bending some pins and a handful from a fellow XOC friend, i had a few open box and sealed ones (which happened to be a numbers maching pair, 57 and 58, which i have dare not opened. After a 3400+ 939 system with an X1950, 1650, 2600XT, popping in a 4200+ for some tests, i came across a gold nugget in the dirt, amongst the scrap lot was an X2 4800+ the fastest 939 offering, the pins came back perfectly and it indeed worked. But for the XP games, 2 cores was pointless, HT is what you wanted and while almost going for the celeron option, my roots with my first PC were AMD and an nvidia card.
Another friend turned out to have a motherboard i forgot i long lusted after (as i was the weird one who drooled over a a strong bored and potato CPU.) The Foxconn Destroyer. With AM2+ and a Bios update i now had an AM3 Sempron 150 at 4Ghz (young me thought i could unlock the CPU if i needed a dual core down the line, not with this board :P) But in MW2005 amongst other NFS titles, they were able to take advantage of the X2 4200+ performance, but on one core, but i found that the high 20s low 30s in tough areas only raised into the low 40s, surely there was more peformance in it, the 2600XT just wasn't enough with the slow downs.
From that same friend they chucked in an ATi HD4870, the baller card that reminded me of that original ATi lust, Crossfire, Foxconn Destroyer, Dual channel (as they were only capable of this on AM2+ with its DDR2 controller.) I knew that card was overkill, but was sad to see the iceQ card i loved just half the framerate of what the 4870/50 i later got was capable of. It however ran warmer than i had liked and just drew power pointlessly. I then remembered the cooler i had put on it was a match made in heaven for a Zotac 9800GT that for some reason has the best mount ever, at idle it sits in the high teens and mid 20s under load, the original slim flower cooler from Zotac producing high 30s idle and mid 50s under load. Faulty T sensor i thought but nope..performance was a hair worse but i could run the fans silent across the whole system.
Not too long ago i found the case i'd have used if i had upgraded, a CM Elite 330, it felt wrong having an athlon when my roots were with a sempron and my first PC i felt needed to have my first PC components back inside, now that i had found an Xpert Vision FX5900XT and 6600XT, the 2 cards i wanted back with that system and an athlon 64 3000 or 3200+ i can finally see what differences it would have made and if that 2800+ had more to give. I always wanted a UV theme back then and after spending way too much on some new old stock UV fans, the whole system was now decked out with them after i found a Scythe Mugen 2 Rev B, the mount was a little sketchy but works. The motherboard sadly hits an FSB wall i haven't been able to get past and these chips with a good bin can reach the mid 4s, but as it stands, the poorly optimised games now run above the monitor's 75Hz refresh rate and in those Unreal engine titles, the framerates are silly high.
The last thing i need to explore is Vista that enables the use of Hybrid SLi, the dGPU on the board is derived from 8400GS silicon and with such a card in the system can enable one of the poorer SLi combos but would be amusing to explore, definitely worth a HWbot submission :P
3:17 *AMD Sempron - 16GB RAM DDR3*
During the Sempron era, it was much more common to use DDR2.
Those that could afford a mobo with DDR3 support, most likely would also upgrade to some cpu Phenom (X4 or X6).
Sempron was analog to the Celeron, thankfully back in 2007 when my mom's colleague from work was helping choosing parts for my build we went to Athlon X2.
I owned the 140 and unlocked its hidden core successfully on a budget motherboard. It performed pretty good when it actually came out.
Very cool Sargas chip. Those were 1c/1t and shipped out 15 years ago + 1 week. 2.7GHz was quite a jump compared to the Lima chip that I daily in my server: Athlon 2650e. Another 1c/1t unit but 1.6GHz and capped at a grand total of 15W. Doesn't hold a candle to the Phenom II X4 system I built the same year but that also seems to be the entire point. There is a weird need for these single core systems lately and it's mostly for software compatibility and high availability servers that need to sip power. 2GB DDR2 is abysmal but does the job.
If you want better performance out of that Sempron you might be better off sticking to one DIMM per channel. There have always been issues with dual sets of memory in that time period.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing!
i dont understand why you have only 15k abos :( but i love your videos keep it going "! :)
bro all of them AMD E and all those similar budget series were a crime against humanity
You have to keep in mind that single board computers and low end systems are often used in industrial/commercial situations.
I can't speak for today but as of 2012 there was still a lot of billion dollar industries that ran their systems on Pentium/Pentium 2 era hardware and DOS apps with keypads and tiny CRTs as the interface.
There was still a market for single threaded CPUs for situations like that, though IO becomes the issue then. Most of these old machines connected over serial, which is becoming more difficult to get. When you're talking about a $10K lathe or a $1 million box cutter, you figure out how to keep old tech alive.
Great video! I always enjoy seeing some of the more obscure products coming to light, even if it's just for testing purposes. AMD probably just wanted what money they could get from all their products, and for the time, these probably still would have been fine for applications that simply didn't need the extra compute. After all, there where still A LOT of applications that just didn't take advantage of extra cores and threads back then.
Somewhere I've got a Sempron 145 which did unlock great to a dual core. Have had it in my home server running 24/7 for almost 2 years. Never crashed. I don't remember how high it did OC but hey, it got eventually replaced with a Phenom II quad core.
Back in the day, I got a Sempron 145 for a MoBo that was left behind after an upgrade that I turned into a storage server. The moment I installed it in the socket and turned the PC on, I was greated in the BIOS with the invitation to unlock it. I did that and found out that it actually had 2MB of cache and identified itself as an Athlon X2 245. Ran like that for a few years until I retired it to storage, with the purpose of one day building a Win98 machine with it, if I find DDR3 modules that are small; like 2x256MB or 1x512MB at most.
I've run across these and other Semprons in scrapped PC's typically recovered from minority and generally poor neighborhoods. They were "popular" in super low budget systems and marketed to folks that didn't know what a CPU was and thought they were getting a bargain. They could do dial up e-mail and very basic web browsing, but most of the folks that bought them never even did that much with them. They might even be paired with Windows ME for a better experience.
Of note, it is surprising how many of these salvage systems came in still in good working condition. It's like they were never used by anyone. I know I have at least one Sempron system left under a pile of pulled 486's and P90's,
Is that a scythe mugen?
Edit: ah yes you mentioned it. Love that cooler, good memories.
It is! I believe a Mugen 2 or 3
I used to have a Pentium 133Mhz chip that I ran at 166Mhz without a heatsink..
They cleaned out our library at Loyola one night. Switched every 166 for a 133 right after they came out. They actually took the time to replace the chips. One computer didn't boot and we found out that day.
I looked up CpuMark's list of "Top Gaming CPUs". Oddly, I didn't see the Sempron 130 listed....
Loved the Sempron. The pricing was perfect for a struggling college student and the fact that it was AM3 meant at the time I could always upgrade to something better later. Just had to dumpster dive for the rest of the PC.
Amd fast 1 core cpu is the opteron 856 model and the Sempron 250 model
I don't know that I'd have ever classified these as a 'consumer' chip- they're more like the cheapest possible CPU you can get for passive rigs that don't use the CPU. Pair this with a 4090 or 2 (or other powerful GPUs) then turn it into a rig that only uses the GPU for AI models, hashing/mining or just general number crunching that only uses the GPU. There's a use case for this, but it's not as a regular PC, I suspect most who bought these bought in bulk and that extra 10-20 dollars adds up when you're maybe buying hundreds of them at a time. You'd have a many of these PC's, then a more standard PC that you'd use to remotely control them and sync up the GPUs to work together- I've never done this before but some of my Friends have had some really strange setups like what I mentioned.
My jaw did drop when beamng pulled up at 18fps
It was impressive!
Good video but on the gaming benchmarks you should have chose older games from the time the chip came out 2011 and before, but other than that great video.
In hindsight I would have wanted to add some older titles. My thinking was that most budget chips from 2011 would have been able to provide a basic experience in these newer titles, but I had perhaps overestimated this chip lol
Nice review. Love the history be hind this CPU. Looking forward to more reviews. New subscriber too. Take care.
Thanks for the kinds words!
@@FullyBuffered You're welcome. Take care
AMD in those days took binning to the extreme. If a CPU was defective but would work in any configuration at all, they would sell it. They would sell an X6 part as a Sempron if one of the six cores would work at a salable price.
But those were still just barely good enough for everyday tasks in 2011. I never bought one, because even if I were building someone a basic PC, a dual-core Athlon wasn't much more and would sometimes unlock to a Phenom II and work fine. One thing I know the Semprons were used for is that some high-end motherboards refused to initialize a CPU that came out after the board did; you couldn't even flash an updated BIOS. But the Sempron would always be recognized and allow you to flash.
They where paying per wafer - so lets say you can get X amount of fully good working dies out of it, and X / X / X amount of half, quarter functional dies out of it. You obviously don't throw the half working dies away - you fuse these off either through BIOS (firmware) or as of today with hardware fuses and sell them for lower priced parts. This way nothing gets lost.
Agreed! Thanks for sharing
Have not gave a second thought to the Sempron 3800+ in years.
Great video. I have been an AMD user since I built my first home computer - Back In The Day ; LoL
I had an sempron before I got my first athlon and then phenom.
It was my first cpu I overclocked and the performance increase was really great. This cpu got me into overclocking and pc's in general.
Is it possible to disable all other cores on a contemporary CPU like 14900k with only 1 P core or E core left to run？
you are a pimp lmao playing the DS while waiting for gta v to start up
I have a Sempron 140 and 145 at home, both can unlock the extra core and they work flawlessly. I also have an Athlon II x2 (or Phenom II x2, not sure anymore) that fully unlocks to 4 cores and 6MB of cache and the improvement is staggering.
Gaming on a DS, what an absolute legend you are 🎉
Back in the day it took me multiple minutes to load every race on nfs most wanted with 256mb ram. Finally saved up for a 1gb stick of ram and put it in and it loaded like 10x faster
Windows 8 actually runs VERY well with Single-Core CPUs like this.
I have an old laptop with a Pentium M 1.6GHz and 2GB DDR1 RAM in it, and it runs Windows 8 rather easily; I can play OG Runescape on it with the ATi X1300 graphics!
I remember the last updates for GTA V for the X360 were bringing the poor console to it's knees. Startup was around 10min and it crashed a lot in Online. Good times😅
4:15 To truly test at what resolution is YT playback still acceptable, you have to make the video fullscreen and the monitor is have to be at that resolution too. Otherwise it's scaled down video, which runs smoother than it would on real 1080p resolution.
Honestly... I've always wondered if this is just placebo effect but... we got along with single core/1 (sometimes 2 I guess with HT) thread for a long time, I realise that applications were less demanding then but... a fast single core chip in the late 90s/early 00's seemed to cope fine with some pretty heavy multitasking.
I guess OS's changed though, Windows 10 certainly won't be made with this configuration in mind and neither is anything else. Modern websites are definitely heavier but does sort of make you wonder just how much power we're wasting, the very idea of needing multiple cores just to smoothly browse the average website would seem quite ludicrous in the 2000-2006 sort of era, well into "web 2.0" days with all the extra demands it placed upon systems.
True - I have the suspicion a lot of websites and software have become unnecessarily bloated - especially with advertising, tracking, embedded videos and so on... Windows XP on a hard drive wasn't necessarily slow, but now you can use Windows 11 with an NVMe drive and still have it feeling sluggish.