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Hardware AMD Athlon 5350 (Kabini) Review

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Dogbert666, 24 Apr 2014.

  1. Dogbert666

    Dogbert666 *Fewer Lover of bit-tech Administrator

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  2. barny2767

    barny2767 What's a Dremel?

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    Well that all looks ok to me for cheap office pc's and maybe a media centre. I may get one of these instead of a Pi because the extra performance and usability is worth the price and it even better if you have a few parts laying around as most of us will do. I would need a CPU, mobo, case and ram to have a working media centre
     
  3. Chicken76

    Chicken76 Minimodder

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    I wonder if ESXi runs on Kabini if you plug a supported NIC in the PCI-E slot. Theoretically it should run, as the CPU is X86 and has virtualization extensions. I expect the SATA ports to not be available to the hypervizor (lack of drivers), and also any kind of pass-through to be impossible.

    @BitTech
    It would be interesting if you could review this motherboard. It's of special interest for modders, as it can be powered by a laptop DC power supply. Interesting aspects to touch on in the review would be: power consumption numbers on a 19V PSU, low-power (90-150W) ATX PSU and regular (350+ Watts) PSU. Also, interesting for any AM1 motherboard, what happens when you plug an ECC DIMM (unbuffered)? Does it POST/work? Is ECC active? AMD says the SOC supports ECC memory, mobo manufacturers have no mention of it though.
     
  4. Jim

    Jim Ineptimodder

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    Out of interest, did you have a stab at running games with the settings dialled down until it produced >30fps?
     
  5. MrJay

    MrJay You are always where you want to be

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    Seriously considering the quad core Sempron variant for a low powered home server, looks almost ideal.

    I'm keen to see what board partners will do, there is allot of scope for embedded applications, SODIMM memory, dual NIC's etc.
     
  6. Combatus

    Combatus Bit-tech Modding + hardware reviews Lover of bit-tech Super Moderator

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    Can't help on the ESXi front at the moment but yes we'll review that board and other if there's enough interest. Will ask AMD on the other bits and see what they say!
     
  7. Combatus

    Combatus Bit-tech Modding + hardware reviews Lover of bit-tech Super Moderator

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    That's what I'm thinking too! It's kind of got the best of everything - low power, low cost and enough grunt to run Windows and use it as an HTPC/media server. Much better setup than most of the embedded offerings of the past except for Core i3 NUC's and above but they're twice the price. Will be interesting to see what board partners do - the cost will likely be an issue as the board price is one of the key selling points.
     
  8. GeorgeStorm

    GeorgeStorm Aggressive PC Builder

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    Yeah, I'm thinking of buying a pi to act as a simple file server using some external drives, with the potential to also be used as a media player in the future, but one of these may be more suited.

    Happy they don't have too much grunt though, otherwise I'd feel annoyed at building a FM2 media PC setup at Christmas :p (used to play games as well, which I don't think one of these would cope with)
     
  9. Combatus

    Combatus Bit-tech Modding + hardware reviews Lover of bit-tech Super Moderator

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    Exactly - AMD has been quite careful here not to make it too close to Kaveri in terms of 2D and 3D performance. We'll be doing feature looking at a range of games and the settings you need to use with this particular APU to get playable frame rates.
     
  10. MrJay

    MrJay You are always where you want to be

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    I've had a go at the PI server, slow processor is slow! Cubietruck may be up your street as it has a solitary SATA port. Down side is the community and available distros are limited.

    Well worth the fuss power consumption wise 5-10w for an ARM board inc drives vs 25w plus from a low powered ITX system.

    I'm in the middle of making my Cubietruck file server solar powered! (I have a man shed).
     
  11. SchizoFrog

    SchizoFrog What's a Dremel?

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    Would like to have seen an Intel Pentium G3220 up against this, especially as adding a discrete GPU was also mentioned.
     
  12. GeorgeK

    GeorgeK Swinging the banhammer Super Moderator

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    Something like that motherboard within a passively cooled case would be perfect for my C-ITX 64 project that's faltered mostly due heat / height & PSU issues...

    Definitely rekindled my interest in making it happen however :)

    Any thought about how this CPU would handle playback of blurays?
     
  13. GeorgeK

    GeorgeK Swinging the banhammer Super Moderator

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    I found that with my E35M1-I Deluxe board that it couldn't handle 1080p playback (either blu-ray or streaming) and that it had to work very hard to manage 720p...
     
  14. GeorgeStorm

    GeorgeStorm Aggressive PC Builder

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    Well it's main use would just be as a file server on the network, wouldn't have to do any decoding or anything.

    However if I wanted to then move it to the kitchen so my Mum could watch stuff streamed then I think I'd need something with a little more oomph.
     
  15. Impatience

    Impatience Minimodder

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    I'm looking for these £20 motherboards.. I was wanting the ASUS mATX mobo, but I can't find it cheaper than £40ish once you factor in shipping from other countries etc. Or am I missing some knowledge in decent online PC part shops?
     
  16. azazel1024

    azazel1024 What's a Dremel?

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    Thats my semi issue here. It wasn't actually compared against the Intel low end. The G3220 and H85/87 board stacks up pretty comparably in price...and from everything I can see, a lot better in most things performance wise. Like a lot a lot better and possibly only a hair more power consumption (54 vs 25w TDP doesn't say it all...the G3220 with an mITX board might well idle at lower power then the test config here on the 5350 and probably doesn't use more than 5-10w more under load. The G3220 is more like 30w total power consumption under load, at most).

    Or if you wanted to see cheaper/lower end, a Celeron Haswell setup or Bay Trail Celeron/Pentium setup.

    I'd honestly have concerns with some of the stuff use my server for trying to run it on this, especially single thread performance (iTunes stuff is mostly single thread and I already feel the wait on some actions with my G1610...which seems to be roughly double the single thread performance of the 5350, or possibly a little more). Also too limited on most board setups I've seen for this AMD socket for me as I either need a good integrated NIC (IE Intel) and a PCIe slot for a second or I'd need a couple of PCI-e 1x slots and at least 3 SATA with RAID built in...which no AMD board I have seen had (I'll grant, no Bay Trail-m/d board has it either at this point, but H77/87 does and for the same price range)

    So, at least IMHO, it could not do what I need it to for a low cost server, both performance and features. It could maybe hack it as a backup and cut down server. I don't need much and what I do have and would look at replacing my current server with would likely have the features I need and better performance for no more cost.

    I guess that is why I still have a hard time groking this. As a super cheap computer that can do the basics, it has it covered...but so does Intel and in the same price range give or take litterally a few dollars...and Intel generally has the better CPU performance in this price range in most tasks and often the better board/chipset features. Really the only thing I see AMD having the advantage on here is in graphics, but both systems have graphics so low end you aren't going to want to much other than casual light gaming or some emulation. 720p gaming is pretty optimistic even with settings on very low. I realize, evaluate on existing products, but Cherry Trail coming in just a very small number of months (looks like 6), certainly appears on the surface to have much better graphics than this, likely better CPU compute single/multi and much lower power consumption and if you go in on a tablet chip, much lower cost to (unless Cherry is a lot more expensive, highest in Bay Trail-T chip is less than $40).
     
  17. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    I used to stream 1080p MP4s from a USB hard drive connected to a Raspberry Pi via UPnP without trouble. But I'd certainly recommend something other than a Pi, unless you're A) on a tight budget and 2) very, very patient, cos the CPU ain't great.
     
  18. GeorgeK

    GeorgeK Swinging the banhammer Super Moderator

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    I was using Chrome I think to try to stream youtube and Cyberlink PowerDVD 11 (maybe or perhaps 10) for the blurays... It's now not in my HTPC but is the basis for my backup server.

    Here's one for £25 including delivery (free scan delivery cheesecake :D) - http://www.scan.co.uk/products/giga...1-ddr3-sata-iii-6gb-s-pcie-20-d-sub-hdmi-matx

    and another for £20 plus delivery (unless we still get a delivery offer from CCL) - http://www.cclonline.com/product/14...1M-S2H-AMD-AM1-Micro-ATX-Motherboard/MBD1323/

    Edit: I'm not sure if this is 'the' Asus board you were talking about but here is an Asus board for ~£25

    http://www.cclonline.com/product/14...grated-AMD-Radeon-R-Series-Graphics-/MBD1322/
     
  19. GeorgeStorm

    GeorgeStorm Aggressive PC Builder

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    It would probably just be used via file explorer in windows to access the files then played in vlc on the media pc downstairs, I wouldn't have though the pi would have any problems with that?

    I may look to install xbmc/plex/something similar to give the family a nicer interface when they want to watch something, then just have the network location of the externals connected to the pi in the library.

    I'm not against spending more, I actually thought about it after going home for last week, and taking my Microserver with me to update some backups on the externals, and it just being nice being able to stream without having to muck about with plugging drives in and out. So I thought I might buy another Microserver, but since I've already bought the externals, rather than waste them I thought a pi might be a good option.
     
  20. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Haven't tried CIFS myself, but I can't imagine it's *that* much heavier than UPnP in terms of CPU load. Heck, I could get just shy of 4MB/s solid through the thing using the RC4 cipher in SSH, and that is *severely* CPU-limited.
     
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