AMD APU line- how good are they?

[I.M.O.G.]

Interesting.

I dunno though, its hard for me to wrap my head around. We would be kinda hard on anyone considering putting a $100 GPU in crossfire with a $250-$300 GPU - that is sort of similar to the APU + strongDiscrete setup. So it still seems weird to me to think that pairing a $250-300GPU with APU graphics would be favorable over pairing a $250-300GPU with a more capable CPU.

Interesting..... It would be good to have someone do a front page review of this....

Agreed. Who wants to work on running a few controlled tests and write it up?

 

[mjw21a]

I think this will be much more interesting with Trinity. I suspect graphics performance will be enough for many even without discrete graphics.

 

[ssjwizard]

Interesting..... It would be good to have someone do a front page review of this....

Ive got the fusion setup to provide results but no SB setup. If one of the reviewers around here wanted to come up with a 6670 and an i3 Id be willing to help with a comparison.

I think this will be much more interesting with Trinity. I suspect graphics performance will be enough for many even without discrete graphics.

Its interesting having watched the trinity specs evolve over the last few months. It looks like trinity mobile will still be using 6xxx series cores BUT will have a few bits of the 7xxx series thrown in for advanced video acceleration, ect. Trinity desktop is supposed to be going full blown southern island graphics though.

 

[mjw21a]

Yeah, I'm keen on the desktop version running crossfired with discrete graphics

 

[TsunamiJuan]

you don't need a i3 to test it out just the video card really, you can downclock any other sb to the same clock speeds and disable cores to make it match the spec of the i3 and you will get the same performance. I know i did this with an i7 to compare the lines of chips to an apu a while back.

One of the largest things you will notice between using the igp or useing a addin card is that if setup right the apu actually gives a much better feel to most games, more overall responsiveness compared to the SB's. Now i haven't played any games using a the x79 hardware, or the bulldozer so i can't compare it to those. But I can definitely say that if the igp was as strong as say my 6970 that i had at the time, would of perferred to game on the APU instead of the sb setup. Infact i actually Raided in wow for about a month just to see how well it compared and I was more than happy with its performance. The thing is i am really really picky about performance and feel when i game so this is a big postive coming from me.