My LLano A4-3300 Review [Old thread - necro]

[sm625]

Short version: It is junk. Far worse than the review sites have told us.

System Parts:

AMD A4-3300 Socket FM1 65W AD3300OJGXBOX $69.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103957

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 Model# F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL $32.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231277

GIGABYTE GA-A75M-UD2H FM1 AMD A75 Motherboard $94.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128511

Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit

SuperPi mod 1.5 1M Result: 30 seconds

Furmark Test: Open Furmark and set to 400:300. Uncheck ALL checkboxes. Click the Burn In Test. Result: 147 frames in 20 seconds.

This sounds like its not really all that bad. After all, the Nvidia 6200 in my other PC only gets 20 frames in 30 seconds. But its when you run Furmark that you see what the real problem with this chip is. When I click and drag the Furmark window as the test is running, there is this awful lag. It is very bad and very annoying. Installing windows and all the programs I usually install was very annoying. There were times when it simply froze for 5-15 seconds. Very aggravating. There is something seriously wrong (or underpowered about this chip). I just installed W7 on an E6600 system last week, and it flew. It didnt freeze up all the time like this system.

I thought that maybe I wasnt running in dual channel mode. So I moved my dimms around and reran Furmark. New Result: 80 frames in 20 seconds!! Now that is really really bad. So I put it back in dual channel mode.

Next up, overclocking. Set multiplier to 35 (3.5GHz), and was not surprised when I saw super ip 1M was still at 30 seconds. We all know the multi doesnt work but I had to try anyway.

Next I set the RAM to 1600. No dice. I would not post! This is sad because this is DDR-1600 ram. I loosened all the timing to even worse than SPD and not only would it not post, but I had to clear cmos just to get it to revert. So here I have this expensive board and some of the best budget ram you can buy, and no dice. Cant go faster than 1333.

I installed a ZOTAC ION PCIe X1 card ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814500164 ) just for comparison. Right away I'm having a problem very similar to the updating problem... it is taking forever to do things that should go relatively quickly. I literally just installed this card in my E6600 system and it took 3 minutes. On this A4-3300 system it took 12 minutes, including 7 minutes stuck on the "Preparing to shut down your computer" screen. What kind of two-bit crap is that?

Anyway I got the ZOTAC ION installed. I ran Furmark. Same settings, 400:300 with all boxes unchecked. Results: 154 frames in 20 seconds. It still lags quite a bit when moving the Furmark window around. But it is definitely more fluid. Almost bearable.

I removed the Zotac card and went back to onboard video. In the bios I clicked "load optimized defaults". Now Furmark at 400:300 with zero checked boxes gives me 178 frames in 20 seconds. This is kind of odd. I reran and it gets only 90. Sometimes 90. Sometimes 180. Sometimes 130. This is really strange. Disabled CnQ. Same odd results.

I installed league of legends just to see if it can run that game on max settings at 1080p. Based on what I've seen so far I am preparing to be disappointed. LoL Results: at 1440x900, windowed, all medium settings: 18-24 fps. Plays pretty crappy. I couldnt do it regularly I know that. But it is close to playable.

TODO: BCLK overclocking. 120 works so far. 26 sec super pi.

 

[Arkadrel]

You cant overclock ANY llano CPU with multipler (it shows higher mhz, but isnt running higher).

You need to raise your FSB to overclock it, only way that works (most cannot get over 132mhz on their FSB).
No idea why you cant get your memory working at higher speeds.
That sucks cuz higher memory speeds, is what effects it the most in performance.

if anything this just confirms theres no reason to spend a fortune on motherboards.

*edit:

Why are you useing furmark as a valid benchmark? seriously? lmao.
league of legends looks like itd run on 10year old pcs.... so you ll probably be able to play that fine lmao.


*edit 2:

GIGABYTE GA-A75M-UD2H FM1 AMD A75 Motherboard $94.99

^ IF you read the newegg.com feedback about this motherboard, you ll find out that it has ALOT of comments about supported memory moduals. So Gigabyte is probably to blame for your ram issue, or because you bought ram that have issues with this motherboard.

From Newegg comments about this motherboard: Post nr2:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...&SID=u00000687

I've had 3 of these boards so far.
They have all worked well, but stay away from G.Skill memory with this board.
Go to Corsair. I've had problems with G.Skill and the FM1 platform.

You could return the memory, get some differnt memory thats on the supported memory list, for this motherboard (so you know it ll work). Then you probably wouldnt have any issues.

 

[Arkaign]

Yeah I'm not sure what the point of that SKU is really. It's pretty terrible. The faster Llano A8 series is allright, but at best it's only suited for 1366x768 gaming on medium to low details with recent titles.

The A4 is severely crippled.

 

[HumblePie]

Yeah I'm not sure what the point of that SKU is really. It's pretty terrible. The faster Llano A8 series is allright, but at best it's only suited for 1366x768 gaming on medium to low details with recent titles.

The A4 is severely crippled.

Picked up a A6 laptop for my GF the other day. Used K10stat to OC it up to 2.8 GHz while still undervolting the chip with no problem. Ran like a champ when I did so. She was playing Sims 3 just fine too.

 

[Arkaign]

Yeah A6 is kind of in the middle. For stuff like Sims3 it's probably just great. I bet you could possibly run BF3 on it with low enough settings

 

[Zor Prime]

It definitely wants 1600, and the tighter the timings ... the better (naturally, d'oh?).

Performance gain seems to be diminished above 1866 according to reviews I've seen of the platform.

Your review is akin to pouring water down a funnel with your hand clamped around the hose below it, wondering why the water isn't going down any faster.

It's not gonna be a world-beater any way you slice it, but the main problem is the 1333 memory. Llano performance is closely tied to the memory, being an APU.

Your review would be awesome with better RAM and compare the before and after figures.

 

[jacktesterson]

delete

 

[jacktesterson]

It definitely wants 1600, and the tighter the timings ... the better (naturally, d'oh?).

Performance gain seems to be diminished above 1866 according to reviews I've seen of the platform.

Your review is akin to pouring water down a funnel with your hand clamped around the hose below it, wondering why the water isn't going down any faster.

It's not gonna be a world-beater any way you slice it, but the main problem is the 1333 memory. Llano performance is closely tied to the memory, being an APU.

Your review would be awesome with better RAM and compare the before and after figures.

Buy Fast/Low-Latency Memory

Despite marginal gains in application performance, the bottom line here is simple: if you want to get the best horsepower out of a Llano-based APU, that graphics engine needs to breathe. Memory able to support a high data rate at low latencies is absolutely imperative for the best possible frame rates in games.

Don’t sweat DDR3-1866 if it means CAS 8 or 9 timings. Aggressively-tuned DDR3-1600 looks to be the sweet spot. We had luck getting our Kingston HyperX DDR3-2133 kit running at DDR3-1600 CAS 7 on a couple of boards, but not the ASRock board we eventually used for testing. Even at CAS 8, though, performance was superb.


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-a8-3850-llano,2975-6.html

 

[Rvenger]

Yeah A6 is kind of in the middle. For stuff like Sims3 it's probably just great. I bet you could possibly run BF3 on it with low enough settings

BF3 is unplayable on the A6 Alone.

You need an A6 + at least an HD6450 in CF to get 30fps.

I am seriously having some RAM compatibility issues with my ASROCK A75M-HVS and Patriot PC3-12800, its causing video artifacting and restarts constantly. I put in my XMS 3 and its much better. Honestly, I am not all that impressed with any of AMD's offerings and it seems that there is a limited market for these anyways. I am so disappointing, I decided to rip this off my FS/FT here and I am probably putting it on Ebay. I just don't want a fellow AT member to go through the nightmare that I did with finding compatible hardware to work with this. I am going to get a Pentium G620 and H61 mobo to replace it.

 

[sm625]

Oh come on, the RAM I chose was the highest rated. 5 eggs with over 1800 reviews. It makes no sense that it would not even run at 1600 speeds just because it is a gigabyte board. But all of that is irrelevant because it doesn't address the Furmark issue. I ran Furmark on three other systems today. All the results were rock solid and totally repeatable. But on this llano setup I get these wild 100% swings. The CPU/ gpu itself has to be throttling and I can't get it to be consistent. The heatsink remains cool to the touch no matter how hard I push it. Furmark reports the gpu in a range of 24-32 degrees. Cpuid hwmonitor won't even read anything. The bios reports 10 degrees on the CPU and 40 C for the "system". It just seems like this thing should never have been released...

 

[Blitzvogel]

If I have any issue with the A4, it's that the GPU is too severely unclocked, but if it was higher, it would be approaching the A6 in graphics performance, and of course be too close to low end dedicated graphics performance. 160 SPs is enough to make some games run just fine, but when they are gimped to something like 443 MHz for two of the desktop models, and still only 600 MHz for the other one.......

 

[Zstream]

If I have any issue with the A4, it's that the GPU is too severely unclocked, but if it was higher, it would be approaching the A6 in graphics performance, and of course be too close to low end dedicated graphics performance. 160 SPs is enough to make some games run just fine, but when they are gimped to something like 443 MHz for two of the desktop models, and still only 600 MHz for the other one.......

Who cares about the GPU for now. I want to know if it will play HD video and run as a pretty decent CPU.

I would like say a p4 2.8 is 100% for a control variable. Would this CPU be ranked at 175%?

 

[Yes_man]

Hello guys
I have a small question regarding A4-3300 performance. Is it suited for old games 2002-2006 on full detail for HD ready (1280x1024 or 1680x1050)?

I mean games like doom 3, half life 2 etc.

BR
Chris

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

The A4-3300 in my 14" laptop is nowhere near as bad as you say. Sure I get poor performance in games, but older ones like CSS, HL2, and Portal 2 work just fine, even WoW works ok on lower settings.

For light usage like Youtube 1080p video, word processing and web browsing it works just as well as my desktop. It also comes with the bonus of having great battery life. I get 3 hours of flash intensive web browsing out of it.

 

[sm625]

I went into the "Vison Control Engine" and reduced all the setting to "Performance" and away from "Quality".

Now when I run Furmark I get 220 frames in 20 seconds. I did get it to run at DDR3-1600 speed just by changing the CPU-NB Freq setting from Auto to 16. (Auto sets it to 20 I think.) With a slight overclock I was able to get as many as 290 frames in 20 seconds.

I have overclocked the gpu as high as 800MHz. It runs fine but it doesnt seem to scale very well. Going from 440 to 800 only boosts my frame count by about 10%.

The mouse is extremely laggy while taxing the gpu. I find that totally unacceptable. For me it is a gamebreaker. Nothing is what I'd call playable, not even 2002 era graphics like league of legends. An sb pentium plus ANY $40 video card would smoke this and cost less.

 

[yottabit]

All I determined from your first post is that you don't know how to properly set up a computer and you're blaming it on the CPU

It sounds like as others pointed out a motherboard <-> memory incompatibility. This does not mean you can't get the system stable. I bet if you ran Memtest overnight even at your DDR-1333 settings you would get crazy errors right now.

"Oh come on, the RAM I chose was the highest rated. 5 eggs with over 1800 reviews. It makes no sense that it would not even run at 1600 speeds just because it is a gigabyte board. But all of that is irrelevant because it doesn't address the Furmark issue. I ran Furmark on three other systems today. All the results were rock solid and totally repeatable. But on this llano setup I get these wild 100&#37; swings. The CPU/ gpu itself has to be throttling and I can't get it to be consistent. The heatsink remains cool to the touch no matter how hard I push it. Furmark reports the gpu in a range of 24-32 degrees. Cpuid hwmonitor won't even read anything. The bios reports 10 degrees on the CPU and 40 C for the "system". It just seems like this thing should never have been released..."

If you have memory instability, it can cause all kinds of funky things in your system. I've had both Intel and AMD motherboards that are very finicky with RAM, and the *quality* of the RAM (at least as determined by thousands of Newegg reviews) really has nothing to do with it.

First before doing anything else you really need to take a step back and get things running stable. Then worry about overclocking, benchmarking, etc.

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

I went into the "Vison Control Engine" and reduced all the setting to "Performance" and away from "Quality".

Now when I run Furmark I get 220 frames in 20 seconds. I did get it to run at DDR3-1600 speed just by changing the CPU-NB Freq setting from Auto to 16. (Auto sets it to 20 I think.) With a slight overclock I was able to get as many as 290 frames in 20 seconds.

I have overclocked the gpu as high as 800MHz. It runs fine but it doesnt seem to scale very well. Going from 440 to 800 only boosts my frame count by about 10%.

The mouse is extremely laggy while taxing the gpu. I find that totally unacceptable. For me it is a gamebreaker. Nothing is what I'd call playable, not even 2002 era graphics like league of legends. An sb pentium plus ANY $40 video card would smoke this and cost less.

Something is wrong with your setup, I get none of the "laggy" problems with my A4-3300.

 

[agnu]

i play HL2EP2 maxed out on a A4-3300...something is wrong in your system

 

[frozentundra123456]

Please do not take this as a criticism, I am legitimately curious. Why did you decide to get the A4 instead of one of the higher end Llanos? Were you just curious what it would do, or was it a lot cheaper, or for power savings? It seems rather gimped, even compared to the other desktop Llanos.

 

[Kristijonas]

I've just finished Deus ex Human Revolution with high settings, 1650x1080, with no antiliasing and no vsync. Little to no lag, mostly high fps. Signature PC.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

Isn't 30 fps in super pi 1 m what a64 oc used to do back in 2005-2006? :S

 

[wirednuts]

so op is MAD AS HELL that he cant play newer games with $70 worth of cpu and gpu combined?

how well does the intel alternative do at this price point?

and if it plays 1080p video and hd flash, then i would say its a fantastic deal for the money.

 

[cebalrai]

I used one of these to build a cheap, ITX HD streaming box for a friend. It was great for the task and dirt-cheap.

 

[sm625]

so op is MAD AS HELL that he cant play newer games with $70 worth of cpu and gpu combined?

how well does the intel alternative do at this price point?

I went on ebay and bought an E6600 (conroe) and a HD4850 for $70 combined. Rest assured it smokes the hell out of this llano configuration.

 

[Arachnotronic]

I bought an A8-3850 for evaluation for client low end gaming builds. The GPU is competent, but it really requires high bandwidth memory (read: expensive) to reach even close to GT 430 levels of performance.

iGPU is only good for non-gaming builds, in which case it is pretty much a godsend since it keeps costs down.