got an APU, post in here.

if you have an APU post your thoughts about them here.

I have an A6 6400K, if all you do is surf the interwebs and that facebook thing or even tweeter it just might be the right cpu for you.
it draws very low wattage, the stock fan is dead quiet at stock and it puts out very little heat. max all stock wattage from the wall was around 100-125
the igpu is fine for that kind of stuff and even watching some youtube is fine.
if you game at all, your right into trouble, I have stuffed a 7970 into the box with it and there is no way on earth to get the little lump to feed the gpu, I have had mine all the way up to 5.2 ghz and it is a hopeless mess at best, so I am sending that card to a very hot prison in mississippi until further notice. the wattage from the wall was around 350 and that's a little steep.
the next card is a 7850, it was a bloody mess right up to 4.8 ghz and the heaven benchmark will run with out all the stutters and stammers, at 5.2 with this card you can sit through it and not have your eyes bleed.
It games fair to poorly with this card because it's just to much card for the cpu to feed. the wattage from the wall was around 225 at 5.2 and around 175 in the upper 4.?s
I think the next card into the chamber will be an hd7770 ghzoc card, this just might be the perfect match for the cpu.
we do have a few more things on the way to bottleneck with it, what you might ask, well how about a gtx760oc card, or a 7970sc card and last, but not least a 770sc card is on the way.

post your apu fun.

This was posted in Just Putzun here C/D. I did not have it around long enough to really play with it, but it was a pretty good setup for light gaming and surfing. The attachments do not work anymore since the update to the forum, unfortunately.

I picked up an A10-7850k/Gigabyte F2A88X-UP4 combo from microcenter for my dad to replace his Athlon II XP setup. I wanted to do some testing on it before I set it up for him and give my impressions of it.

I'm running it on a Prolimatech Megahalems heatsink, figuring it would give me a better real world perspective then if I put it on my big H2O loop. I was able to get it stable at 4.2 with the stock 1.35 voltage, with all the power saving features disabled. I ran it on Prime Blend 2 hours and the temps never went above 42c during the test. That was as high as I tried for 24/7 stability.

Pushing the 2D limits, I got it up to 4.7 @ 1.45 Cpu V and was able to run a few benches there, but it was no where near stable. I tried for higher and found it does not like being above 60c at all. It froze nearly every time I ran any bench. I wanted to test it against the Fx 8350 to see if there were improvements. I tested using the same clock speeds on the Cpu 4.6 in most cases and ram Mhz at 1866, with slightly tighter timings on the Fx 8350 Ram "ras to cas 9 vs 10." All tests were run on win 7.
What I saw
SuperPi 1m,: is about 3.8 seconds quicker on the A10 7850k vs the Fx 8350
Cinebench 11.5: The A10-7850 scored 4.34 vs 3.99 on the 8350 with 4 cores active
Wprime32m: A10-7850 is about 1.5 seconds faster then the 8350 w 4 cores active.

I also pushed the Gpu on it to 1000 on the cores from 720 and was fairly impressed with it's performance, though I didn't realize how important the installed Ram is for the Gpu. I ran a few tests on 3D benches and screen shots will follow. What I found was overclocking the cores made a slight improvement on the graphics performance. What really does the trick is running the Ram higher. I was only able to get it to run as high as 2133 on my 1866 Snipers. I also tried my benching sticks Ripjaw X 2133's 7-10-7 but was unable to get them to run at 2133 or above no matter how much I loosened the timings. I wasn't going into all the trouble of setting the secondary and tertiary timings so this will have to do.

Running the ram at 2133 vs 1866 with the cores at 1000mhz on the Gpu:
3D Mark 11: 2702 vs 2661 huge improvement, no, but it's still and improvement.
Heaven D9x: 759 vs 696

As far as the Gpu goes I compared it to a few of my other Gpu's and found that my Fps in 3D Mark 11 were almost exactly the same on the A10-7850k as my NVidia 450Gts when both are overclocked to their max. That said if I were able to run the A10-7850k with faster ram it may have beaten the 450 gts.
Superpi 1M A10-7850

Good read "manny".
RGone...ster.

I've been playing with an A4-5000 since May. It's in an HP laptop. I got the laptop for free using Airmiles points. Didn't have enough points to fly anywhere interesting but I had enough for this laptop.

I use it as an internet appliance and for Microsoft Office. The most commonly used programs are Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Facebook App, Flappy Bird, and Google Chrome.

It's noticeably slow (the 500GB HDD doesn't help much) but honestly, it's more than sufficient for what I need. My last low-cost laptop solution was an Atom based Netbook circa 2012. That was way too slow. It felt like I had a 286 in there. Struggled to do anything.

Simple 2D games run well, 1080P video plays flawlessly, webpages scroll smoothly... it's all I need.

I think the A4-5000 is actually a very intriguing chip. You can't buy it boxed as it's a BGA chip. You can only buy it already on a board, but the boards with A4-5000 on board start at just over $50. That's $25 APU/$25 board. That's not half bad. For somebody on a major budget, that's actually a really compelling option.

BIOSTAR A68N-5000 AMD A4-5000 Quad-Core APU Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU/VGA Combo $69

+

http://pcpartpicker.com/user/mistersprinkles/saved/CGJBD3

$131+$69= $200

If you already have an OS, you can build a full computer with the A4 5000 for $200. Sure, it's a crap PSU but what is the system going to draw? 30-40W?

Quite the amazing deal IMO. I just might throw the above system together for my dad.

I have a A4-4000 on ASUS A55BM-Plus.

It sits in a drawer under the TV in my mother living room as a low end HTPC.

Main use is internet broswsing and watching movies, TV shows and documentaries@1080p, which it does flawlessly.

I miserably failed on any overclocking attempt with this one...

I might try again one of those days.

IIRC total cost (CPU/MoBo/PSU/RAM) €200, which is OK.

one of my mistakes with this is my board, sata2, usb 2.0, pcie 2.0, and no way to hook my front usb ports up so to plug in a flash drive I have to reach aroung the back.
my board the the cheapest you can get in fm2+, if your looking at apu's the 88 chipset is the much better way to go.
as for a psu to run it, I dont see why a 250 watt unit would not do just fine if your not going to try to win a benching contest.

I've got about 5 amd apus but never used them for anything but benching (under ss). Have to say....these chips are a blast to bench!!! I had crazy amounts of fun with them and most did pretty well. Some did better at 2D than 3D and vice versa but awesome to be able to run every benchmark with a single chip. Pretty sure that at some point I'll put them under the cascade and go for the gusto or kill the chips trying hehehe

Pretty sure that at some point I'll put them under the cascade and go for the gusto or kill the chips trying hehehe

Click to expand...

Isn't that the case for all your chips, Funsoul?

Ummm...well.....ok....maybe you're right. How else to know how far stuff can go until you push it to the line? That said...I do seem to step beyond that line a bit too often :/

my A6 6400K chip I think it's pile driver cores so all my ram up to 2000 can just pop right in and that is also a pretty fair plus for it.
it is almost as much fun as a regular cpu to bench because it pretty much is, just not as impressive as the 8 core cpus.

Built an APU rig (A-10 6500k, Asus A85V-Pro) and it runs great. Super stable. Haven't tried to OC it as it's just for running office & browsing. Paired with Win 8.1 and a Samsung SSD and it's a kick *** little rig.

The notebook that I bought for work has one in it. The a6-1450 I believe. Little 1ghz quad core. Does pretty good for everything I've used it for which consists of videos, various Microsoft office programs and my programs for counselings and things like that. My daughter uses it for various little kids games from the windows store.

Owning an APU just got significantly easier. Price cuts pretty much across the board. The A10-7850K as an example is now $143 instead of $179.

If that is true I do not like my newegg app

got my little hd7770 ghz/oc card in it. everything seems happy with the cpu at 4.4.
in heaven the whole rig, everything in the box, 1 ssd, 2 hdd's coolermaster siedon, monitor and two routers, it draws about 150 watts, that's not bad at all, scores about 1000 in dx11.
folding the whole rig draws 140 watts, not big on points but over a few months pretty cheap to run.
another plus I am finding is that all your am3 cooling pieces fit right on it.

I got A8 6600K but even overclocked @4.7GHz with 2133+ memory it was kinda slow. I'm not saying about average results but sometimes performance was dropping in some games like a visible lag. Hard to say I was happy about it. On i3 4330 without any overclocking I haven't seen anything like that. Integrated gfx card was already too slow to enjoy any newer game. I dislike how AMD is promoting APUs as good for gaming and every lower APU has worse graphics card to the point you can enjoy using web browser and nothing else.

I also have Kabini APUs Athlon 5150 and A4-5000. Both are running great considering their low wattage and really low price. Hard to use them for gaming but are good for almost everything else. Right now one is running in my home NAS and the other is waiting till I have any idea what to do with it.

One of the worse sides of APUs is that motherboard manufacturers cut costs on everything so there is not many good boards on the market and even less good for overclocking. Somehow cheaper Intel boards are usually higher quality and cost about the same. I mean in general things like PCB and power section but also some additional connectors or motherboard layout.

swapping the cards around in this i have found something that bugs me a little.
if you want to update the gpu driver, it never sees the video card, only the igpu, so you have to go find and install the driver for your card manually.

chrisjames61 said:

Owning an APU just got significantly easier. Price cuts pretty much across the board. The A10-7850K as an example is now $143 instead of $179.

Click to expand...

Still too expensive. That needs to be a $110 part in my opinion.

Theocnoob said:

Still too expensive. That needs to be a $110 part in my opinion.

Click to expand...

I don't think that is being realistic. You get a good but not great processor and some very good built in video capabilities. Where could you get an equal cpu and discrete card for $110?

I have a ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 with an A10-5800K at 4.6 GHz and I have Crossblade Ranger with a A10-7850K that I got at the Brooklyn, NY Microcenter for $90 open box. It is running at 4.4 GHz. For my needs they get the job done with less noise and heat than my 8320.