A4-4300M Benchmarks (or "What APUs can do now")

[SPBHM]

what is the price of this compared to the cheapest i3 IB? I'm pretty sure HD4000 would be as fast or faster for gaming.

 

[jvroig]

what is the price of this compared to the cheapest i3 IB? I'm pretty sure HD4000 would be as fast or faster for gaming.

I'm not sure about the comparison, but this ProBook was around $300-320 (I can't give you a more accurate $ figure because I'm converting currencies, and that's not very accurate). I would expect that it would be competing on price against Celerons and maybe Pentiums, but not i3 models.

 

[Brunnis]

Those are pretty nice results for such a cheap machine. Out of interest, I benched my 13" Mac Book Air 2013 (i7, 8GB, HD5000) in HL Lost Coast:

1366x768, High, 0xAA, 16xAF: 104 FPS

1920x1200, Max, 4xAA, 16xAF: 39 FPS

It's been a long time since I last fired up Lost Coast. Actually looked quite nice on max. 🙂

 

[frozentundra123456]

Very nice post and the results are much better than I would have expected. Seems like this is much better than an A10 for the shaders available. Thermal and bandwidth limitations are probably more of a problem for the more powerful part.

Still, an A10 is tempting for its light gaming abilities. Too bad there are not more Intel models available with higher end graphics above the HD4600.

APUs still make no sense to me for gaming on the desktop, but in a laptop, they are a decent choice for light gaming if the price is right.

 

[MeldarthX]

Very nice post and the results are much better than I would have expected. Seems like this is much better than an A10 for the shaders available. Thermal and bandwidth limitations are probably more of a problem for the more powerful part.

Still, an A10 is tempting for its light gaming abilities. Too bad there are not more Intel models available with higher end graphics above the HD4600.

APUs still make no sense to me for gaming on the desktop, but in a laptop, they are a decent choice for light gaming if the price is right.

APU does still make sense on desktop not so much for us; but say kids that want to play roblox; mindcraft some older games ...

I know people with the a4-3300 that game regularly on GW2; Neverwinter; NWN2 - and several other games without any issues on those laptops.

I am surprised just how well that laptop handles games - would it handle metro? No; but I have my desktop for that 🙂

I plan on replacing 5600 X2 with 6800k or Kaveri if Kaveri is out christmas time; kids have two identical machines; same processor; ram; one has 6770 card in it and other has 9600 GT.....both are long in the tooth; though....

 

[rainy]

These APU's are great for the back to school crowd. In Canada FutureShop and BestBuy were selling a 15.6" HP with the fastest Richland A10 with 8GB (2x4) 1866 and a 1TB HDD for only $399.

This is indeed a great price for strongest mobile Richland combined with fastest supported DDR3, unfortunately it's only a temporary deal (up today) - normally that laptop costs 699 dollars.

Unfortunately, the BIOS gives me no such option, and neither does the HP-specific Catalyst Control Center (I say HP-specific because it's the model-specific driver downloaded from the HP site, not the generic one from AMD).

That HP driver could be worse in term of performance than generic one from AMD?

 

[jvroig]

That HP driver could be worse in term of performance than generic one from AMD?

I wouldn't imagine so, or at least the difference probably wouldn't be significant, especially since we are talking about a low baseline (i.e., the absolute value of every % increase would be very small)

Like all vendor binaries, it's been QA'ed and probably tweaked a bit for the specific hardware components found in the model it was made for. Performance is probably similar to generic ones from AMD's download page, perhaps a bit less in cases where AMD's more recent drivers includes optimizations in certain games, but I wouldn't really recommend using a non-vendor-specific driver since it might affect other things other than GPU performance (such as behavior/compatibility with sleep/wakeup, maybe customized power-saving mechanisms that comes with the vendor-specific driver, etc).

The chipset driver and graphics driver (w/control panel) come as separate drivers, with the chipset drivers being much smaller (40mb vs 200mb). The chipset drivers are much newer (May 2013) while the graphics driver is surprisingly dated (Jul 2012).

I don't know, maybe I will give it a try with AMD's latest catalyst. If I get time to re-bench a few titles with just a single stick of RAM, then I'll also throw in a test using AMD's latest driver.

 

[rainy]

I have seen on Internet that some people advise to use generic drivers from AMD, Nvidia or Intel instead of OEM because you'll get higher peformance, more features and probably less bugs, however I don't know how it would be in your case.

I don't know, maybe I will give it a try with AMD's latest catalyst. If I get time to re-bench a few titles with just a single stick of RAM, then I'll also throw in a test using AMD's latest driver.

I would be very grateful if you could do that.