craig5320

AMD Llano A8-3850 APU and Gigabyte A75-UD4H Launch Review

Today we have the A8-3850 APU running on Gigabytes A75-UD4H motherboard and will be putting them through a selection of tests to find out how they compare to the equivalent i3/Z68 system. Whether you are interested in media conversion, playback or gaming performance this article will demonstrate where the A8 and A75 fit into the current market.

__________________

HardwareHeaven on Facebook

Matth

No useful IGP comparison, as the Intel IGP loses by a DX11 knockout.

Actually, highlights some more questions, are IGP graphics useful for anything - other than as a cheap solution to getting to Windows desktop. Todays IGPs are a lot better than they used to be, but then todays software is also more demanding.

If you're going to use a card anyway, are there better non-IGP setups that are price comparable, to compete in the discrete graphics tests.

__________________
Mary had a little lamb,
Her father shot it dead
Now Mary takes her lamb to school,
Between two crusts of bread

Veridian3

I disagree, there were two approaches taken. Firstly we looked at what the performance would be on a 6670 (and with dual GPU) which tells you a little about what each architecture would give someone in the midrange. It also tells you what the difference in CPU makes to the overall performance.

Then after that you need to remove any sort of GPU bottleneck and see if the CPU (or PCIe limitations) come into play further. How do you do that? You pop on the fastest cards available and see where the scores end up.

Using different cards (e.g. 6800s) only tells you how the systems perform with that card... it doesn’t tell you what the architecture overall is doing.

This sort of reasoning is why our reviews like this one always start with platform benchmarks for mem, SATA, PCIe, USB 3.0 etc. Too often sites and readers get caught in the trap of a mobo review being done wrong and it ends up being a bunch of CPU tests. That’s not telling you how the board is compared to the competition. The same thing with GPU tests... these sites who review motherboards and have 5 or more graphics tests in them... essentially they don’t get what a motherboard test is. One game will tell you what 5 games will in a motherboard test, it isnt going to change from game to game and anything more is a case of that site trying to make themselves look like they know what they are doing... blinding people with figures which are worthless, but you come away feeling like you read something.

And then sites who put nonsense like image quality comparisons in CPU/Mobo articles... don’t get me started!

For the IGP tests... i doubt anyone reading our review from our normal audience cares about IGP performance. You guys all know it’s not something you are interested in and wouldn’t ever game on it. Doesn’t mean you don’t want to know the basics though... so that’s what you get. 3DMark gives you a ballpark for where performance is and that this is a generation above the Intel chip.

Where it does get interesting though is in the desktop productivity tasks, and those we did focus on.

In summary, I’m open to ideas about how things should be tested and please do let us know if you have any ideas on new, useful tests... but at the same time people need to sit and ask themselves about what they should be expecting from motherboard/CPU reviews... what is actually relevant testing and what is a case of sites not knowing how to test properly and as a result not telling you anything relevant.

Gastrian

I would like to know what gaming could be done on an IGP. I build PCs for family and friends who don't really care about GPUs but do like playing the occasional game on them. Having a rough ball park figure like will it play StarCraft 2 or even Modern Warfare Black Ops on low settings would help and at what settings does it fail.

So really not looking for performance figures but more gaming "compatibility", eg will it play at 720p or 1080p (I build HTPCs) and does it look good enough.

__________________