Hardware AMD A8-3850 Review

Can AMD's new desktop APU mark a turnaround in fortunes for the company?

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/06/30/amd-a8-3850-review/1

 

that certainly is pretty damn good for the projected price

 

It's really great... Great performance/price... Well done AMD

 

YAY

 

If they throw one of these chips onto an ITX board I'll be sold.. Playing most games without a dedicated GPU! 100watts sounds heaps, but if you're only running a APU and no discrete gpu, its pretty low. Pico-PSU territory

 

A3850 £105
Cheapest board £72
£177

MSI 760GM-P33 £37
Phenom II X4 840 £78
5770 £74

£189

There's no comp really is there...

Personally the only place I see a market for it is mini ITX and HTPC and only the HTPC is used for games as well. Certainly don't see the point of it in a budget gaming machine as you can clearly build better for the same ish price.

 

My LAN party group has two fusion pc's for backup, just in case someone else wants to play mainly source games. They do really well with source engine games.

 

Ok that's a good point.

 

That's a stonking result for the GPU - really impressive for onboard. Shame the rest of the CPU doesn't hold up though - imagine an Intel SB coupled with the AMD GPU tech?

I think this will definitely capture the low end/HPTC market though. Prices will drop over the next month as well.

 

If some agressive pricing happens then it might be able to compete in a desktop environment I guess. For £207 (Probably £200 on TO) you could have an i3 2100 and the 5770.

Could anyone ever really suggest FM1 over an i3, MSI board and a 5770 for the sake of £20 to £30?

 

Think about this - AMD, with so little money to compete against Intel, has just hit the ball out of the park. They have destroyed the sub £60 discrete graphics market where they probably weren't making much money anyway. They have hit on a proposition for the volume shifters to business which makes real sense - really competitive against Intel and their discrete gpu offerings. Only one thing needed now - accelerated applications that use CUDA. If AMD can get that right with generic business applications - your browser, your anti-virus, your email, your spreadsheet, your database, etc...

Well done AMD, but the work isn't over...

 

That's the big problem - it only makes sense if you don't buy a discrete gpu, and it's only a few more quid to get a system with one in. I can see for something like internet gaming cafe's it works well, but for someone buying their own pc? Either they aren't gamers in which case the i3 is faster for everything else, or they are gamers in which case they'd be much better off stumping up a few extra quid for a discrete card and preferably an i5. That machine would be a lot faster and the cpu will be fast enough for years meaning you just need to update your graphics now and again to stay current.

I think the true market for these chips is budget gaming laptops, for desktops can't see many buyers outside the hardcore fanboys.

 

wooohooo, well done AMD

 

In truth I think the A8-3800 may be a more attractive option than the A8-3850 - It's got the same great GPU on board but has a significantly lower TDP and all you sacrifice for this is a few hundred MHz in base clock speed on the CPU. We've already said that if it's only CPU processing power you want then you're better off with the Intel CPU, so losing a little bit of CPU power isn't the end of the world (i.e. you're not looking at these CPUs because you want raw processing power).

It should be cheaper than the A8-3850 too which should make it better value too.

Unfortunately we didn't get any say over which processor AMD sent us for testing,

 

I think they fall between two stools. The only use I can see for these in an enthusiast environment is in htpcs. They'll make their way into mainstream pcs alright and sell by the bucketload but they don't offer optimal performance as they still struggle on the 50% of tasks that mainstream users will use them for.

 

Think about the on-going developer platform - quad core pc's with discrete level graphics - look at the Steam stats to realise what an advance that'd be...

 

Is something up with the table on page 1? I'm sure AMD aren't introducing four new sockets at once, and it doesn't make much sense for the 3850 and 3650 to both have a 100w TDP but the 3650 to have lower clock speeds for both CPU and GPU (as well as a smaller GPU) *. Methinks Excel's auto fill has been playing with it.

*Checked else where, turns out they do have the same TDP. That's weird.

 

So no review to see how it performs with a discrete graphics card? Was it by any chance not worth testing? I myself am an AMD fanboi but even I have to admit that over £80+ there is just no point in buying their products.

 

Guys, get a different board, both Asus, Gigabyte and MSI have board with an external clock gen that allows you to overclock the APU's by quite some margin....

 

Wow, that was some seriously good gaming performance for intergrated graphics, what does this say for Nvidia? Because at the end of the day that thing is better than most the sub £50 cards available, they'll lose their extreme budget market to AMD if this continues, maybe they'll have to combine with Intel to create a nvidia based onboard GPU