Review: AMD Sempron LE-1250 vs LE-1300 vs Athlon LE-1640

I’ve compared three AMD’s Socket AM2 processors with prices below $50 in the US market. These are the AMD Sempron LE-1250 and LE-1300, clocked at 2.2 and 2.3GHz respectively, and the 2.7GHz AMD Athlon LE-1640. All CPUs are single core units and come in retail packages with coolers included.

The tested 64-bit chips have 512KB of L2 cache and a 45W power consumption. They are built using the 65nm production technology. The Semprons have an 800MHz HyperTransport link, whereas the Athlon LE-1640 uses a 1000Mhz HT. Supported instruction sets include MMX, 3DNow, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, and x86-64. In addition, the 1640 supports virtualization.

AMD Sempron LE-1250

AMD Sempron LE-1300

AMD Athlon LE-1640

As expected, the LE-1250 and LE-1300 have similar performance, while the Athlon is somewhat faster as you can see from the benchmark results below. The test configuration includes the Asus M2N-E SLI motherboard, 2GB of DDR2 800MHz memory, a 500GB 7,200rpm hard drive, a Cooler Master 620W PSU, the Thermaltake Shark case with front and rear fans, and Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit OS.

Windows Vista Experience Index for the Sempron 1250 and 1300 is 4.1 and 4.2 respectively, whereas the Athlon 1640 scores 4.4 points.

The tested CPUs have very similar temperatures, which were approximately between 26C and 28C on idle and 35C-37C under load (PC Mark 05 CPU test). Please note that the fan speed during the test was 3,000rpm and that Athlon’s heatsink has a slightly larger surface.

For everyday tasks such as web surfing, email, word processing etc, you won’t notice much difference in performance between the benchmarked processors, which currently have price differences of less than $5.00. If you need larger quantities of affordable entry-level single-core AM2 processors without virtualization support, you can buy the Semprons and save a few dollars per CPU. However, if you need a virtualization-enabled chip and a better performance get the Athlon LE-1640.