Budget CPU Integrated Graphics Performance

[Yuriman]

Did a bit more reading. There don't seem to be many reviews of the lower end APUs so we need to do some extrapolating.

http://www.techspot.com/review/580-amd-a10-5800k/page7.html

The A6 has half of the graphics cores of the 5800K, and the A4, 1/3. They're clocked slightly lower as well, but for the sake of easy comparison we'll ignore that.

In FarCry2, the A10 5800K pulls 101fps. We can extrapolate that an A6 would pull around 51fps and an A3, about 34fps. The HD2k and HD2500 get around 46fps.

In The Witcher the A10 gets 32fps, putting the A6 at around 16fps and the A4 at around 11. Intel graphics get around 8fps.

In BFBC2, the A10 pulls 67fps which puts the A6 at 33fps and the A4 at 23fps. The HD2k in the 2500k pulls about 29fps.

^ In a lot of the tests in that link, it looks like i3 vs i5 might be CPU limited even using onboard graphics at the low settings they picked (SC2 is a good example).

Honestly it's a tough call, I'm pushed toward the AMD APU because it hasn't been stripped down nearly so much as Celerons (ie lack of AVX/OpenCL) and due to clockspeed differences the Celeron won't really have a big advantage in raw CPU power, but Intel CPUs definitely take the cake when it comes to performance per watt.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Did a bit more reading. There don't seem to be many reviews of the lower end APUs so we need to do some extrapolating.

We could definitely do with some more reviews of low-end parts. Not too many sites seem interested in doing that...:whiste:

 

[ControlD]

Thanks for the analysis Yuriman.

At this point I am leaning towards the A4-5300. Newegg has a combo deal with this chip and the exact motherboard I am looking at so maybe I will just let price guide me here. I really have a feeling that either CPU will work for my application. Once I get my mind made up I will report back with some results if people are interested.

 

[Yuriman]

Yes please.

 

[Agent11]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5831/amd-trinity-review-a10-4600m-a-new-hope/6

I would try to get an A10, best integrated graphics available atm.

 

[ControlD]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5831/amd-trinity-review-a10-4600m-a-new-hope/6

I would try to get an A10, best integrated graphics available atm.

It does look like a good CPU but it is not in that "budget" range I am shooting for here.

 

[AtenRa]

Did a bit more reading. There don't seem to be many reviews of the lower end APUs so we need to do some extrapolating.


The A6 has half of the graphics cores of the 5800K, and the A4, 1/3. They're clocked slightly lower as well, but for the sake of easy comparison we'll ignore that.

In FarCry2, the A10 5800K pulls 101fps. We can extrapolate that an A6 would pull around 51fps and an A3, about 34fps. The HD2k and HD2500 get around 46fps.

In The Witcher the A10 gets 32fps, putting the A6 at around 16fps and the A4 at around 11. Intel graphics get around 8fps.

In BFBC2, the A10 pulls 67fps which puts the A6 at 33fps and the A4 at 23fps. The HD2k in the 2500k pulls about 29fps.

^ In a lot of the tests in that link, it looks like i3 vs i5 might be CPU limited even using onboard graphics at the low settings they picked (SC2 is a good example).

Honestly it's a tough call, I'm pushed toward the AMD APU because it hasn't been stripped down nearly so much as Celerons (ie lack of AVX/OpenCL) and due to clockspeed differences the Celeron won't really have a big advantage in raw CPU power, but Intel CPUs definitely take the cake when it comes to performance per watt.

From TH Trinity review,


At Batman A6-5400K is only 35% behind A10-5800K

At WoW A6-5400K is only 28,5% behind A10-5800K

At Skyrim A6-5400K is only 28,9% behind A10-5800K

At Diablo III A6-5400K is only 40% behind A10-5800K

You will not find a single Game that A6-5400K is 50% slower than A10-5800K at 720p. In some cases, A6-5400K could be close to or better even than the HD4000(Shogun 2, Portal 2, Civ 5 etc)

 

[nemesismk2]

From TH Trinity review,


At Batman A6-5400K is only 35% behind A10-5800K

At WoW A6-5400K is only 28,5% behind A10-5800K

At Skyrim A6-5400K is only 28,9% behind A10-5800K

At Diablo III A6-5400K is only 40% behind A10-5800K

You will not find a single Game that A6-5400K is 50% slower than A10-5800K at 720p. In some cases, A6-5400K could be close to or better even than the HD4000(Shogun 2, Portal 2, Civ 5 etc)

those are impressive results for Trinity

 

[Agent11]

Intel is really hammering AMD on the low end prices now though.

 

[Yuriman]

From TH Trinity review,


At Batman A6-5400K is only 35% behind A10-5800K
IMG

At WoW A6-5400K is only 28,5% behind A10-5800K
IMG

At Skyrim A6-5400K is only 28,9% behind A10-5800K
IMG

At Diablo III A6-5400K is only 40% behind A10-5800K
IMG

You will not find a single Game that A6-5400K is 50% slower than A10-5800K at 720p. In some cases, A6-5400K could be close to or better even than the HD4000(Shogun 2, Portal 2, Civ 5 etc)

Perhaps they are running low enough graphical settings that the games are actually somewhat CPU bound even with the iGPU? The A6 is clocked almost as high as the A10, it's just a single module chip.

That's clearly the case in some of the benchmarks I've looked at - for instance, Starcraft at medium settings is considerably faster running on an i3 with HD4000 than on an FX-4100 with a GTX-680 because it's so CPU bound.

 

[frozentundra123456]

those are impressive results for Trinity

Does anybody really game at 1280 x 720 on a desktop? That resolution is even lower than a low end laptop screen.

 

[Arkaign]

Used.

Buy used.

The low-end CPUs ALL have fairly crap GPUs. Some less crap than others. But if you're even THINKING of light gaming :

Buy used.

 

[ControlD]

Used.

Buy used.

The low-end CPUs ALL have fairly crap GPUs. Some less crap than others. But if you're even THINKING of light gaming :

Buy used.

I hear you and normally I probably would but ....

This machine will only be used for MAME and the front end used to run my arcade cabinet. There will be no 3D gaming at all on this system which is what got me thinking about trying something integrated into the CPU rather than running a discrete GPU. If all else fails and the system simply cannot handle even that, I am also looking to upgrade my unRAID box and that needs no graphical capability at all except to access the BIOS screen.

 

[ControlD]

Well, I have a A4-5300 on order that should be here by the weekend. I have relatively low expectations but am still excited to see what this $64 chip can actually do. If nothing else it will be a nice upgrade over my Atom system for my unraid machine. If this one doesn't do the trick for my MAME machine I will go with a Celeron + cheap video card.

 

[SPBHM]

nice, if you can share any benchmark with us, at least one 3dmark result or something, because looking on google I can't find anything about the trinity A4 performance...

 

[ControlD]

nice, if you can share any benchmark with us, at least one 3dmark result or something, because looking on google I can't find anything about the trinity A4 performance...

Sure thing. I will try to get some results as soon as everything is in and built. Should be ready to go this weekend I hope.

 

[relztes]

Perhaps they are running low enough graphical settings that the games are actually somewhat CPU bound even with the iGPU? The A6 is clocked almost as high as the A10, it's just a single module chip.

That's clearly the case in some of the benchmarks I've looked at - for instance, Starcraft at medium settings is considerably faster running on an i3 with HD4000 than on an FX-4100 with a GTX-680 because it's so CPU bound.

Well, theoretical compute power is only one factor that influences performance. Trinity is starved for memory bandwidth. Compare the HD6670, 96x5 shaders at 800 MHz to the A10-5800K, 96x4 shaders at 800 MHz. The HD6670 has a 128-bit GDDR5 memory interface for 64GB/s bandwidth. The A10 has a 128-bit DDR3 memory interface for 25.6 GB/s bandwidth (using 1600 MT/s DDR3 like Tomshardware). There are also other factors like ROPs which might not be scaled between A4 and A10, but I don't really understand all of that. I think memory bandwidth is the main reason the differences between A6 and A10 are smaller than expected. By the time you get to the A4 though, the memory bandwidth is probably less of a limitation, so I'd expect more scaling between the A4 and A6.

 

[sm625]

Never buy an A4 in name of saving money. My llano review has detail what it is like trying to multitask anything with one of these APus. Buy a used video card.

Only buy an apu if you are trying to save power.

I too am very disappointed in the constant inability to find any meaningful benchmarks on these types of cpus. Not just these chips but budget notebook chips too. How many fps does an A6-4455M get in skyrim at 720p? Who the hell knows. How about a pentium B980, or a pentium 2117U or a pentium 2020m? Arghhh. Truly disappointing.

 

[ControlD]

Never buy an A4 in name of saving money. My llano review has detail what it is like trying to multitask anything with one of these APus. Buy a used video card.

Only buy an apu if you are trying to save power.

I too am very disappointed in the constant inability to find any meaningful benchmarks on these types of cpus. Not just these chips but budget notebook chips too. How many fps does an A6-4455M get in skyrim at 720p? Who the hell knows. How about a pentium B980, or a pentium 2117U or a pentium 2020m? Arghhh. Truly disappointing.

I wish you had posted that one day earlier lol. Well the good news is that I am trying to save power here so if nothing else the A4 should make for a decent unRAID processor.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Never buy an A4 in name of saving money. My llano review has detail what it is like trying to multitask anything with one of these APus. Buy a used video card.

Oh, please... my Celeron G465 handles multitasking fairly well and that's a single core with HT...

I too am very disappointed in the constant inability to find any meaningful benchmarks on these types of cpus. Not just these chips but budget notebook chips too. How many fps does an A6-4455M get in skyrim at 720p? Who the hell knows. How about a pentium B980, or a pentium 2117U or a pentium 2020m? Arghhh. Truly disappointing.

Yes, very annoying. Most sites don't seem to care to review low-end parts, I can understand why but it still annoys me. You just have to extrapolate and guesstimate based on available data...:\

 

[Hubb1e]

I kinda wish you had gotten the A6 because it is unlocked and would have been fun to hear your experience with it if you wanted to overclock it. Single threaded performance is pretty good with the A6 Trinity and if you took it to 4.8ghz I'm sure it would do very well as web browsing machine. Yeah, it has one floating point unit but you guys forget that Trinity's one floating point unit is almost twice as fast as in PhII so really the differences are pretty small in real use cases. The Athlon II at 3.4 ghz is still competitive with the Sandy Celerons if you look at Bench. I wouldn't complain about using a 3.4ghz Athlon II dual core for daily tasks.

 

[ControlD]

I kinda wish you had gotten the A6 because it is unlocked and would have been fun to hear your experience with it if you wanted to overclock it. Single threaded performance is pretty good with the A6 Trinity and if you took it to 4.8ghz I'm sure it would do very well as web browsing machine. Yeah, it has one floating point unit but you guys forget that Trinity's one floating point unit is almost twice as fast as in PhII so really the differences are pretty small in real use cases. The Athlon II at 3.4 ghz is still competitive with the Sandy Celerons if you look at Bench. I wouldn't complain about using a 3.4ghz Athlon II dual core for daily tasks.

Well, this is the first of two systems I am building so going with a A6 is still an option depending on how the A4 works out. I decided to go with a lower performer first knowing that no matter what I try first it will work for my initial application. If the A4 is not up to the task of running my MAME machine then the A6 is still a viable option.

 

[ControlD]

OK, everything is here. Are there any tests in particular people would like me to run? I will be installing Win 7 x64 on there for my MAME test so any benchmark that runs under Win7 is fair game.

 

[SPBHM]

windows 7 WEI scores are not very useful but easy to test and compare, also I think 3dmark vantage is OK to have a notion of how GPU and CPU performs....
maybe PCmark 7?

 

[Yuriman]

I'm really curious about GPU performance (especially scaling), but it's been a while since I was into GPU benchmarking. How many of these benchmarks can you duplicate?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6332/amd-trinity-a10-5800k-a8-5600k-review-part-1