AMD Sempron is amazing for Windows 98 and DOS Retro Gaming! 

In my professional work I assembled many computers on 754 and then 939. But then came the Core 2 Duo and dominated the market for the next few years leaving AMD behind. I am writing this from Poland and have been working as a service technician and seller of computers and laptops for 22 years.

I will always credit the 2800+ Sempron as the beginning of my learning to properly overclock.

Very relaxing and great as usually!

I’m doing great Phil! How are you!!? Thanks for making great content for my teenagers to enjoy. I have all the parts from every build since 1995. It’s fun visiting the old tech every now and again. I can’t believe what some of this old stuff is worth these day 😮

I was deep into S754 awhile back. I had a mobile 4000+ on a DFI Lanparty, clocked at 2.7ghz. That was a fun build, maybe a little overkill for the socket. My current 754 is a Sempron 3400+ so this video was really interesting. Good stuff as always Phil

I like this socket because it could also support PCIE with the very last boards made, so a nice transition board. I have an ASRock K8NF6G-VSTA board and it has been a wonderful 98/XP dual boot rig using an X800 PCIE card. Socket 939 will always be my favorite, but these s754 boards were a great step up from Socket 462/A . Great video!

Changing the capacitors is easy or hard depending on how many layers the motherboard has, on those AsRock Pentium 4 boards, its a nightmare even with a desoldering gun, you need to use an hot air station to keep the heat of the board up while you use the gun to clear the through holes, huge nightmare and expensive and that's not even counting the capacitors cost.

Just a little tid bit in case anyone is having issues booting from SSDs on some VIA chipsets - something I discovered is the VT8237 and VT8237R southbridges have a hardware bug where they are not able to work with SATA II or SATA III drives (like SSDs) and it was fixed in the VT8237R Plus revision seen on this board. As a workaround for chipsets with the bug, you can use a SATA to IDE converter and use the IDE connector instead

Guess what? I'm about to finish my DREAM PC BUILD of 2008, with the Socket 775. For the video : The A64 3700+ is really good... I had a 4000+ with 512kb cache for socket AM2, and it seems that the 3700+ performs better because it has twice the cache. I never thought that having 1mb of l2 could make a true difference but now I think the opposite.

I had an old Compaq Presario with a Sempron 3000 socket 939 around 2004. One day at I found an Athlon 64 4000+ in a pile of junk CPU's at local parts store and bought it for $10. I was amazed by the difference. I used this PC for almost 10 years and played everything from Rollercoaster Tycoon to League of Legends. Good memories.

Thank you for this! I fondly remember building a 754 setup in my late teens. am2 came after. Fun chips back then ❤️

I owned the x850xt (platinum edition) and can still remember it because it was a beast and gave me the opportunity to run all games at max settings for a long time. It looked exactly like yours, i assume the only difference was a factory overclock. I still can remember that the sound of the cooling solution was like a hair dryer.

Not that I was paying much attention but I actually didn't know there were 90nm CPUs on S754. Pretty cool actually.

Phil, your videos are great. I would love to see a video with your full retro CPU collection. That would be amaizng

Hey Phil, thank you so very much for all the work you have done with your channel all these years! Cheers from Argentina

That 3700+ is a BEAST!

Hey Phil! Happy Friday!

First time I see you. You are nothing like I imagined. Thanks for all your videos.

I remember the Sempron series, we had a *lot* of these kicking about for years in offices as they worked with Windows 7 & 8 just fine for data entry and emails. I still think that there's a few still in use in some manufacturing plants because they're so easy to passively cool (fans get gunked up quite a bit)

Socket 754 has to be one of my favorites based on forward and backward compatibility alone. DOS through W10 works great. Most 754 boards died from capacitor plague or small component failures in my experience based on at least 50 boards that have come across my bench in the past few years, just today I tested two dead Chaintechs. On the CPU side I had a mobile 4000+ up until a few months ago when I sold it, but just last week I picked up a 3700+ and the same X850 XT at a local recycler for $1.

754 is a great retro platform. I got a dirt cheap 754 MSI board and Athlon 64 back in late 2020 for my windows 98 setup. The VIA chipset has some instability with sata under win98, but once disabled its been really solid. And caps are still holding up, though I suspect I'll need to swap mine out soon as the board is going on 20 years old.

Cool! thanks for the tip. i think i'll keep my old Athlon64 duo for future retro use with my SB-Live i found in an old drawer..

Phil Fridays are always fun. Appreciate you, Phil!

I am super happy that you introduced me to snappy driver installer, phil! I keep the full package on an external SSD so I can do them really quick. However, I only use that as a last resort, I will use windows update and the manufactuerer's website drivers and use snappy for whatever is left. I used it today on a 2nd gen intel core hp laptop, I couldn't get a good pcie card reader driver from the website or windows update (win 10), but snappy driver got it going.

The last 754 cpus with "venice" core made in 0.90u and SSE3 seems the better option for this plataform, venice A64 3200+ and 3400+ they have only 512k l2 but for the low heat and better instructions they are better and cheaper than 3400+ and 3700+ derived from the initial Clawhammer design

Best way to start the year!

Thanks for rounding up this socket! As I probably have said a couple of times, I had a Sempron 2800+ paired with at Geforce 6200 card and it was terrific running World of Warcraft back in the day. Still got the system (even the boxes), built in a somewhat new case. The last years I have started "collecting" 754 motherboards and CPU:s and found very nice boxed Athlon 64:s, since they are so cheap. The boxes from this era are just phenomenal, very sturdy. A very nice platform indeed for making time machines.

I remember these CPU's for a cheap all purpose light gaming back in day.. My favorite single core was the Athlon 64 4000+. It had a 1 meg of cache and a 2.4 gigahertz clock. Thanks for video Phil!

I didn't expect to see a CPU I used to own being tested! I think I had a Sempron 3100+, from 2003 to 2012. It was great!

Hello Phil This is CG coming from Cleveland Ohio At work at the moment So I will be watching this later on Until then have yourself a fantastic Aussie day

Another great video!

love to see RGB output.❣

Nice video. 😄👍 Shame 754 did not support Dual-Channel. Only the 939 variants did. Had me waiting until i could afford a 939 setup back then.

They overclock like beasts. 50% or more.

Excellent video, like!

Hey Phil! And late but honest Happy New Year! ;)

Socket 754.. Didnt seem like it was around for long. I recon I built someone a Sempron system years ago

I used to be the uk specialist for a music computer device called The muse receptor. It used (mostly) AMD Turion CPU’s. I believe thats a higher end version of Semperon yes? I have loads of them lying around my office! :)

I have several socket 754 boards with the Nvidia nforce 410 chipset/Geforce 6150 (Biostar boards I think) I purchased new back in the day, plus a bunch of Sempron CPU's (ranging from 2800+ to 3400+). Cheers!

Wieder mal 1A Video, danke Phil!

Used to run a Sempron for a bit while between cpu's can't remember which socket (AM something I think, AM2+ or 3 maybe) pretty sure I remember having some success unlocking a core in it, think they were essentially broken Athlon x3 which themselves were essentially broken Athlon x4 lol. Even today cpu cache seems to have significant impact on some games, although it's kinda difficult to measure.

Man, old motherboard look like manufacturers used whichever dye fell into the mold lol

They are great Windows 98 processors. It can sometimes be hit or miss with DOS sound depending on the chipset.. i like to use SiS, i find that I have best luck with an Aureal Vortex

Funfact, you can use a Ryzen 7 cooler on these CPU's. Every clip cooler is compatible with AMD sockets since 747.

I built a Windows XP rig around an AsRock Skt 754 motherboard with an nVidia chipset. I have 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 9800GT. I ran the original release of Skyrim on that machine, even though it says it requires dual core CPU. It would either run perfectly, or not at all. Other XP-era games worked great on that machine. I don't know where that computer is now. How do you lose a computer?

Some of the 754 cpus are really hard to find. Gj

Athlon 64 / Sempron 64 was such a step up comparing to S462 CPU's back in the days. It was literally the same thing which Ryzen is these days for AMD. Ofc it lasted until C2D was launched, and put Intel on the top again.

"recapping" capacitors is something I would like you show and tell, sometime.

I easily overclocked my Sempron 2600+ from 1600 to 2400 MHz (50%!!!) back in 2004 when overclocking was not called PBO or PBO2 (only 5% >_

Phil wearing glasses reminds me of Ultraman ;)

Interesting results 🤔

I had a system with a 2800+ in it. It was not very powerful but the amount of gaming hours I put on it made it worth it.

I've got one of those still, a 3400+ from what I remember, actually took it out from a case just the other day. It's a Gigabyte board with nForce 4 chipset (no onboard graphics). I ran Linux on that thing for years, built it for hassle-free Linux experience around 2006... I was a poor university student.

3:25 It looks like the first video of 2023 could not start properly with some issues, right?🤣 Socket 754 CPUs are the most fond CPUs I can think of, especially while Pentium III/Athlon XP PCs are fun, sure, but the fact, that you can use the newer PSUs and such.... Makes it less stressful to use and (Well, Hopefully at least) you can still buy the newest PSU that can run going Sempron 64/Athlon 64 Setup and being much more secure than these older PCs with these aformentioned CPUs. BTW. Pentium 4 ain't exactly my cup of tea, sadly.

Somewhere around here I have an Athlon 64 3500+ and a Radeon X850 XT. That was my last single-core processor.

That video card looks very interesting

One thing I don't understand is why they decided to go with new name rather than just revive well remembered Duron brand? I remember how Duron was well received - back in the day, this kind of performance was so low price was a bargain. I'm suprised that AMD abandonend so beloved brand first for older Athlon models, and then for yet another brand that never had comperable impact.

I think I'm unlucky enough to have the sempron 3000+ in my retro build without the 64-bit support

I had a look and as you said, those old ati cards are not cheap.

When the graphics card was bigger than the cooler...

I don't know if you've tried this, but you can use winsetupfromusb to an sd card, and then use sd card to IDE on the target pc for a super snappy windows installation. Probably works with CF card too, but haven't tested that yet.

Whoa. My first PC was a sempron (can't remember which one) single core 1.7GHz. It has Foxconn motherboard and an Nvidia MX card on AGP slot.

You could probably break some of the older benchmarking records just by combining a modern PCIE gpu with an older system. Maybe even use one of those startech pci->pcie adapters.

Fastest CPU i have for this platform is Mobile AMD Athlon 64 4000+. Check it, it is very interesting CPU. But be careful with CPU core and other uncovered elements, i burned 1 such processor.

Sadly all of my socket A, 754 and 939 boards are in storage awaiting resurrection, sent to an early grave by cheap taiwanese capacitors. Very unfortunate because the only working vintage boards I now have are all S7/SS7 and I had forgotten how buggy and fragile these setups often were.

Phil Sempron 3100+ with 256KB cache is a great processor especially for overclocking, you need to compare Athlon 3700+ with Sempron 3100+OC or Turion ML- 42/44OC, for performance and people don't need to buy overpriced Athlon 3700+, it would be a great video

Happy New Year. I miss some B-roll material where you can see how you connect and test it. Always just showing the bare cards and the results, I find a bit dry.

I gotta say, I’m not a fan of the new “hey how are ya?” intro. “Hey guys” was iconic and felt more natural.

In 2005 I upgrade my system to a Sempron 3100+ very excitement! but.... when i wanted to install winxp64 , i discover the sad truth about some of these processors . Only x86 not x86-64

I not not understand why you omit revisions, or not even explain revisional differences, when showing off your hardware. Also, it would be nice if you could figure out how high of a Sempron/Athlon you could go with before speed is an issue with DOS even after dumbing down all of the accelerative options. Perfered video cards for DOS & 98' would be a nice addition as you only covered XP. I almost mentioned the bad cap era thingy last video- glad you covered it. Not always easy for an entry level DYSer- especially since you are in the era where changes from lead based solder to tin based occured due to enviromental regulations resulting in components that are harder to remove and ALSO "tin whiskers" due to the tin based solder resulting in stuff that will not last forever (like all the origional OG hardware does if properly handled.) Also, you mentioned "SSE3" but failed to note why that is so important: You can still get modern browsers to work with SSE3 as oposed to using BS like K-Melon ect With that being said- you "nailed it" figuring out the whole Sempron thing...

Do you think you might be GPU limited at those quality settings? Perhaps you’d get a clearer picture of CPU performance with lower quality settings to avoid GPU bottlenecks? Just a thought. I’d be interested to see such a test, I believe the difference between processors would be much more noticeable. Fantastic information, regardless!

Very similar to my main retro rig: S754 Athlon 64 3200+ 1MB, 2GB DDR400, X800XT PE, & Audigy 2 ZS. Cannot find a 3700+ to replace the 3200+. Also trying to find a 939 4800+. I only have a 4600+ at the moment as I stupidly disposed of both 4800+ CPUs I had back in 2010 or so :(

I remember when my friend bought a Sempron 2500+ and overclocked the CPU by 100% on Epox 8NPA7I. From 1400Mhz he made 2800Mhz by raising HTT to 400Mhz. And what's funny and impressive at the same time - it worked well on box cooling. My Sempron 3000+ with Gigabyte K8NS had 2700 Mhz after OC and that was my last AGP platform.

I was actually expecting a bigger performance gap between the Semprawn and the Athlong 64 (hey, it's not my fault AMD gave their processors stupid names). Although now that I think about it, back in the day I only really looked at reviews of the 939 platform rather than the 754. I always made fun of my friend for having a Semprawn, compared to my Athlong 64 which I think was a 3800+.

Hello, thank you for the video. Would be possible make some video about a software side of retro PCs? E. g. where to get old systems, how to deal with licencing and updates(SPs), what about W98 drivers for this graphic card? Thank you very much.

always go for larger cache👍

Athlon64 is now a good choice for retro single-core build, but back in the day it was just killed by Core2Duo. It was a good CPU for it's time, but there was no software to take advantage of it. Athlon XP, fast Pentium 3 or Pentium IV were good enough for productivity and gaming. When those CPUs become too slow, same thing happened to Athlon64, since Core2Duo and new consoles (X360 and PS3) started new multi-core era.

I had two Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M corrupted by a single faulty 512MB DDR RAM stick (sigh); never thought a faulty RAM would corrupt the BIOS. After that I always perform MemTest86 on any old RAM salvaged from vintage machines. I'm using the roughly equivalent Asus K8V-MX with a Sempron 3100+ as my main Win98SE rig. For some reason 939 MB and CPU (e.g. Athlon 64) are rare and expensive in Taiwan.

Your mobo has so few capacitors for CPU core.. Only 3 ones. Looks like this mobo is complete "entry level" and designed for low power Semprons (just google how all others s754 motherboars are equipped with capacitors). If you will replace this oldie caps, you can install a new capacitors into the two empty positions near CPU VRM and one or two near north bridge and DIMM slot (I think they are both in 2.5v rail for memory). I have similar Gigabyte mobo (full size ATX s754) and recapped it completely recently so there is no old ones and no empty positions on motherboard, runs good :-)

Hello. Can you give me a advice about changing multiplier on Athlon64 socket 754. I put toogether MSI K8T neo V1.0 and I don't have multipiler settings in bios. Every mainboard on socket 754 should have that feature or maybe there is somewhere list with recommended mainboards for that? Building tripple retro system is my goal.

My current nostlagic system whit s754 runs whit Athlon 3400+ (2,4GHz). I would like to buy 3700+ but it's sooo rare nowadays or I can't search. I have lot and lot of Semprons for this platform. Interesting low cost procesors but Athlons are Athlons.

I'm stuck in slot 1 era

939 dual cores next?

You can even run Windows 7 32bits on this motherboard.

First time I saw your face and my god I need to get out more. My library of faces and voice combinations is way too limited

The system is so fast that Unreal could run while the motherboard disconnected altogether!

This is the first time I've ever seen your face.

@Philscomputerlab, I have the same mainbord (only revision 1) and I can't get the Cool&Quiet feature to run normally. Have you tested this out yet? I use an Athlon 64 3400+. After installing the Cool$Quiet driver the system freezes when I start software (games, office etc.). Also did you use an SATA to IDE adapter for the SSD? Every time I use one after installing Windows XP the PC won't boot because it can't find the OS. Or did you use the onboard SATA controller wicht doesn't work with SATA 300 or 600 drives.

Sir amd sempron 145 is good for coding and online works andlso can it run windows 10 pro..

Hi Phil 👋 Do you have any of the mobile athlon64 socket754? They even came in a 4000+ 2.6Ghz on socket754. The late ones (Newark core) will even work with Windows 7.

Yo bro do you have any low profile graphics that I can have. Please

Does Snappy Driver work with Windows 98SE or is there something similiar that will?

since they're used , they're all ''budget'' right now

Hi, The athlon 64 3700+ bottlenecking this radeon?

is it a good win98 setup ???? i want play some old dos games. thanks.

Hey bro, just ordered cheap 2600+ for my untested mobo.. in case mobo worx, can this cpu be oc'd? I mean at least via fsb.. thanx

i have the fastest agp radeon in the sapphire radeon 3850 512mb ddr3...sports a 6 pin power connector which is crazy for that low of memory.

Whenever I hear "Sempron" I always recall a truly horrible Compaq laptop I bought from PC World that struggled to do literally anything in Windows Vista...

Phil you keep going older and older... How about something people actually still use?

Socket 754 is unusable for retro gaming, sorry. Windows 98 are incompatible with PCI-E. Everything without native Win98 support is unusable for retrogaming.