Hardware AMD A8-3850 Review

What tasks that "mainstream" users run will cause this cpu to struggle?

We arn't talking about Atom like performance here we are talking decent quad core Athlon II X4 (640) performance which is more than enough for the majority of users.

 

This.

All the top 3 use external clock gens to overclock - even our cheapest LE board does. You'll be able to crank everything up then.

The ES samples didn't require this, but ALL the retail chips do. ASRock are either saving money by leaving the extra chips off their boards OR they didn't catch this note. That's up to them to say.

 

A £300 PC which can do everything? including run every game currently available (admittedly on low settings)
Well done AMD

 

How is this different to how it's always been? You could build a perfectly capable PC for £300 5 days ago, and 5 years ago.

 

Well, no. Well done Sony and Microsoft, for ensuring that "every game currently available" is a console port. To a console five years old.

 

good review, two questions:

1. mistake in table on page one; is there really a different socket for every A-series SKU (FS1/FS2/FS3/FS4)?

2. do the 65W A-series chips also support DDR3 1866, or is support limited to DDR3 1600?

cheers

 

Yeah, we had one but a bad BIOS update bricked it before testing so we had to use our reserve board (boooo). Check out our Facebook page for the full story (see, there are benefits to following us on Facebook)

 

I think that with a few price tweaks, and when more motherboards come out to compete with each other, it may become a more competitive option.

Sadly, this is true. Although it does offer interesting performance and I'd like to see the overclocked figures with a different motherboard.

 

I agree, I think there is a bigger marked than you give it credit for though.

If you are in the desktop manufacturing business and are knocking out business grade or good "all rounder" (which to be quite honest is where the Core i3 comes into its own) machines the money you would save for not having to include a dedicated graphics option would be quite significant to your profit, both in terms of manufacturing steps and of course the cost of the physical card. Also think about the shape and size (footprint) of the finished product.

Also with your example, look at the difference in power draw between the two options, yes the 5770 is I nice mid/low range card, but it can draw up to 108w. So if you are a manufacturer you’re going to have to supply a 450w psu instead of the 350w with just the APU and board. This also impacts cooling in regards to extra heat to chuck out of the case right down the db rating of the machine as a whole.
This isn’t for mega performance, it’s to directly compete against the Core i3 which it does very well for the average user.

 

What a lovely launch, it's been a good while since AMD really launched anything new for the desktop and now they come up with this. I really love the idea of having a ~100 W TDP rig next to the telly that can even run some games. Until now I've been thinking of building an Atom-based rig for HTPC, but really, what's the point.. This is so much better

Now just give us some ITX-boards already!

 

Some HTPC benchmarks might have been handy, image quality, media playback performance and such like

this chip is (looks to be anyway) perfect for me, I run an LC19 case for my mediaPC and have no room for dedicated GPU as the only free slot is taken up by my Freeview HD card, since upgrading to HD and using Windows Media Centre the system does chug when using the guide with HD playing in the background.

My System is currently a HD4200 on board with an X2 at 2.2ghz, which I had to overclock for smooth HD framerates, this could be the chip I have been waiting for.

 

I agree and hopefully we'll get time to do this in future. We simply didn't have the time to do it for this first review though as we only got the test gear fairly recently.

 

That's a 2007 design, this is 2011. It's just much slower then the i3 which is already pretty low end - what is too slow, I don't know but this is pushing it - bit-tech shows it's overall performance is only a little faster then the E6750 (a mid range 4 year old intel dual core). Even in some games it's already too slow - e.g. check out the starcraft 2 figures in xbitlabs review with discrete card. 25fps vs 40 for i3.

Most people with that sort of cpu performance would be looking to upgrade because it's starting to impact what they can do/play.

 

the 65W 3800 is exactly what I am considering for a new LC19 build.

could do with a decent silverstone HSF compatible with AMD sockets though.........

 

This is perfect for students like me - well done AMD

 

When a Zacate E-350 chip can manage and even a Ontario C-50 can just manage 1080p playback I think that Llano should have no problems with this.

 

Wow.

And the scalling evidence from the very small overclock would suggest that with a bit of a clockspeed bump it would be fine for moderate games.

very impressive.

 

This is going to make AMD a truck load of money........until Intel make a better one

This is a good leap forward in a new approach to PC's but still early days. Give it 12 months and this tech would be worth investing in, especially from a business point.

 

Cool, seems other sites are cropping up with reviews too.

I have a flat copper heat sink and fan that fits nice, I'll dig out the spare I have and let you know what it is called, I have been using it for a couple of years with no problems, small fan 7 volted, all I can hear is the HDD, though I use custom clock profiles to downclock and undervolt my CPU.

That may be the case I have not used Zacate yet, I was going to replace my current setup with Zacate but was a little concern the CPU might be a little underpowered, not every on demand TV software has an ability to be accelerated by the GPU hence me bypassing Zacate for something like Llano.

Might finally ditch my netbook for a Zacate variant though.

 

I'm just saying that without the gpu upgrade this chip would have got "another underperforming chip from amd" review. The idea and future potential us awesome but at the end of the day it scores well less than the equivalent intel in the cpu testing. Effectively it gets a better score for the wow factor of having a gpu on board which is deserved but the CPU element is a disappointment. People who buy a generic dell wouldn't know any different but I'd prefer a quicker CPU and hd 5670. Then again this apu is not aimed at me.

Ps I'm an amd user!