Hardware AMD A8-3870K Review

"Originally Posted by kriswone
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."

yep - i spotted the massive"" error also - but maybe he has a point - maybe the overclock pushes the envelope out handily

we all know ram prices change - still nice to know for down the track a bit

esp given its using shared memory for the gpu - if faster ram did have effect - it could be a lot

 

I can see a good marget for a shrunk, pin compatible Phenom - fine for a lotta folks - they just run too hot

the popular ~780g mobos from years ago even are fine for most - hd movies on the igp no problem

keep it cheapish & many would be tempted by a drop in upgrade, less fan noise & power bills - should have more squirt too

nothing fancy (cheap) - just a shrink & a few tweaks - a holding action against intel

 

Too hot? According to CoreTemp, my PII X3 stays steady around 30C at idle, max 43 or so fully loaded, OCed from 2.8 to 3.3.. That's under a CM Hyper TX+ cooler, nothing exotic.

I'm not terribly interested in the "what AMD should have done is" game. I'm just mad that the series that is actually fairly decent is on a brand-new socket. Understandable, given the new architecture, but disappointing just the same.

 

+1

would have cost less than FX and delivered more

 

this apu rocks, in terms of bang for buck, it kicks ass !, pair it up with a 6670, and for around £300 for the whole system, you got a decent mid range rig that will last 4/5 yrs, maybe even longer, but, a word of warning, amd's next line of apu's are due for release this 3rd quarter, and will probably be twice as powerfull, for around the same money, if you can wrangle a bundle deal cheap, buy,buy, if not, wait for the new apu's.....

 

that makes no sense to pair it up with a video card. crossfire from ati is buggy enough as it is, i can imagine that dual graphics is fail just like nvidia optimus. it would have been good if mr. leather just stuck to modding articles (i enjoy reading those and am glad he is still with cpc) and left this type of review alone. call of duty?! i don't even know someone who plays this game, let alone play it myself. why no GTA IV/EFLC in the benchmarks? now THAT would really have had some use for me - built the machine myself anyway last week -after waiting for a responsible journalist to actually adress GTA IV/Llano gameplay, i gave up. otherwise, an enjoyable article. same for the "what type of memory for Llano CPUs" article.