Hardware AMD A8-3870K Review

AMD's budget build-tastic APUs get an unlocked mulitplier with the A8-3870K

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2012/02/06/amd-a8-3870-review/1

 

sadly good performance at 1280x720 doesn't seem that useful nowadays, with 1080p monitors dirt cheap.

Still, i've been recommending the apus ever since their release to anyone who needs a cheap well balanced machine for some light gaming / web browsing etc.

 

good for a HTPC!!
now if only AMD could atleast do something similar in the highend market!

 

Great chip for a Media pc and for light gaming.

 

I've been waiting for a review on the unlocked chips for a while now, so glad you have done one! I am impressed with them.

I'd like to see a power consumption comparison to a Intel system with a low end discrete GPU that performs similarly to the 6550D in the APU.

 

I suppose if you add a cheap 6xxx series gfx card as well, say a 6770, crossfire mode with the built in GPU will give you performance somewhere between a 6870 & 6950, you have a heck of a cheap gaming rig.

...if you can put up with AMD dual card gfx drivers that is.

 

Would have liked to have seen it's performance with a dedicated video card, I know that's not what it's intended for, but it's what I'm running atm due to selling my old main rig

 

Ygpm (not thread related)

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk

 

Just replied

On topic, I also noticed incredibly erratic framerates when I used the integrated gpu, mainly on tf2 (since that's all I played with it).

You guys notice anything similar? Any chance you could test it with TF2 if you've still got it?

 

now that Phenoms are so hard to get hold of, would be nice if AMD increased all caches...

 

Id have to look it up but wasn't crossfire with the onboard gpu limited to lower end 6xxx parts?

 

"If you're on a tight budget and don't mine gaming at 1,680 x 1,050...."

Otherwise a great article as always bit-tech, thanks.

 

Every time i see a review of AMD APU's BIT-Tech consistently uses "DDR3 1600" - is there a reason you do not test with at least 1866 or 2133? many reviews say the jump from 1600 to 1866 is a massive improvement in the GPU on AMD APU's, why are you trying to limit the machine? Lets not implement a bottleneck when testing.

Until you have a proper set up for AMD APU's please don't review them.

 

Page 8, paragraph 9:

I believe you're mistaken. These APUs are Athlon II based (Propus/Regor have 512KB/1MB L2 cache and no L3 cache) and not Phenom II (Deneb has 512KB L2 and 6MB L3 cache).

 

..because 3.6Ghz is about as much as you will get out of these CPU's, so you simply dont need faster RAM, as 1600Mhz DDR3 is enough for that sort of maximum overclock.

If you want to spend more on faster RAM, knock yourself out, but you would have to be very lucky to get a chip that can make use of it and be 100% stable.

 

lol...

i wouldn't call a 5-10% increase a massive jump, especially when the price jump for those sticks of ram is more like 100%...

get a clue...

and the problem with these chips isn't their gpu performance, so why bother?

until you have a proper understanding about why bit-tech reviews products with certain kit please don't post a comment

 

indeed, the jump from 1333 to 1600 is a huge improvement (when using the GPU on the apu), but the next step to 1866 yields only tangible benefits - in this sense 1600 is the optimal solution here.

 

So... what GPU is paired with the i3?

 

We use 1,600MHz RAM as when the first APUs came out 1,600MHz was (and still is to a degree) the sweet spot for the market in terms of price. This meant that the first testing we did with Llano was done with 1,600MHz RAM as Llano is for the cheaper end of the market.

This means that for the time being, every time we test a Llano chip we'll use 1,600MHz RAM so that you can compare the results across all the different FM1 processors we've tested. We may revise the test kit at some point of course, but given that that'll mean going back and testing all the previous processors again there isn't much appetite for it at the moment.

Plus we did this memory testing when Llano first came out, so regular readers should be aware of what advantages 1,866MHz RAM offers, should they want to go down that route.

So can we continue testing AMD APUs? Pretty please.

 

he'll have to ponder your request...his assistant will reply with an answer once he is suitably ready to ponder

lol