Best value "Entry Level" gaming PC.

[frozentundra123456]

Why would anyone pair a discrete card with an atom or kabini? Get a *real* cpu, not a tablet one.

 

[cbn]

Why would anyone pair a discrete card with an atom or kabini? Get a *real* cpu, not a tablet one.

CPU World reported both a Athlon x4 550 and Athlon x4 530 seen in support lists:

http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2014/...nd_550_CPUs_sighted_in_CPU_support_lists.html

It will be interesting to see if these iGPU less AM1 chips ever make it to market and what the intended use will be?

Maybe if the price is low enough there is a possible use case for Mini-ITX gamer, but if not then I can only see these being viable for a headless server (provided the consumer motherboard using the chip can boot without a video card installed after the server is configured).

P.S. Regarding the gamer usage of an Athlon x4 530 or Athlon x4 550, adding in a discrete card (example: my Fermi based Nvidia GT620) will increase idle power consumption over a Athlon 5350. I guess this wouldn't be too bad if the machine is not left idling for a long periods of time. Maybe a living room PC that is turned off when not in use would fit this criteria?

 

[cbn]

Some new price cuts on AMD APUs on the way:

http://techreport.com/news/27246/amd-cuts-a-series-desktop-processor-prices

A6-7400K drops from $85 to $58.

Also:

A4-6300 should go down from $47.99 to $34. The A4-5300 and A4-4400, which aren't listed as retail-boxed processors at Newegg, now carry suggested e-tail prices of $31 and $27, respectively.

 

[cbn]

Regarding single vs. dual channel memory testing, here is the maximum speed memory listed for the various chips:

1. Athlon 5350/Athlon 5150: DDR3 1600
2. A4-7300: DDR3 1600
3. Celeron/Pentium: DDR3 1333 (On Non-Z boards)
4. A6-5400K/6400K: DDR3 1866

I only have 1 x 4GB DDR3 1600 and 2 x 2GB DDR3 1600 at the moment.

I have a 4GB DDR3 1866 stick on the way in addition to a Gigabyte F2A58M-DS2 mATX motherboard.

So I will be able to do a proper A6-5400K single channel test now.

I am looking forward to eventually obtaining a A6-7400K now that AMD has dropped the price down to $58 (hopefully this change will reflected in the retailer pricing soon....and ideally stacked with some sort of value bundle.)

P.S. I have been wondering what kind of cpu performance difference the A6-7400K will have with the A8-7600 under iGPU load considering both processors come with 65 watt coolers. Maybe the difference is not large as we think due to cpu throttling? (With that mentioned, it will probably be a while before I get a A8-7600 let alone a A6-7400K)

 

[monkeydelmagico]

Some new price cuts on AMD APUs on the way:

http://techreport.com/news/27246/amd-cuts-a-series-desktop-processor-prices

A6-7400K drops from $85 to $58.

Also:

This would make for a wonderful low cost mITX, overclockable, mild gaming and general computing build. The vendor's haven't gotten the memo yet though. As of right now the lowest I could find was $70.- for this chip.

 

[cbn]

Passmark comparisons:

A6-7400K: 2972 cpu marks

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+A6-7400K+Radeon+R5,+6+Compute+Cores+2C+4G

A6-5400K: 2145 cpu marks

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+A6-5400K+APU

Celeron G1820: 2858 cpu marks

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+G1820+@+2.70GHz

Celeron G1840: 2848 cpu marks (why is it lower than G1820?)

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+G1840+@+2.80GHz

Pentium G3220: 3188 cpu marks

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+G3220+@+3.00GHz&id=2020

So the A6-7400K is somewhere in between the Haswell Celeron and locked G3220 Pentium, and much better than the A6-5400K.

Not bad, but a few points to consider:

The A6-7400K has a nice 256 stream processor iGPU and unlocked multiplier. How much can these two things be used with the stock 65 watt cooler? CPU throttling under iGPU load?

 

[cbn]

This would make for a wonderful low cost mITX, overclockable, mild gaming and general computing build. The vendor's haven't gotten the memo yet though. As of right now the lowest I could find was $70.- for this chip.

Yep, I am looking forward to the actual price drop.

Also, as mentioned earlier in this thread it would be awesome if one the OEMs could make a budget Mini-ITX A55/A58 FM2+ board for us (reduced features would also be fine with me). Currently all the FM2+ Mini-ITX boards are A78 and up with a good amount of added features.

 

[cbn]

Here are some Tomb Raider results (using the game's built-in benchmark) from Athlon 5350 (Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bit, 4GB DDR3, 14.301.1001 driver) vs. Core 2 duo E2200 (Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bit, 2GB DDR2) with GT620 (334.6 driver):

Athlon 5350:

800 x 600 (low preset) 42.1 avg FPS
1920 x 1080 (low preset) 11.4 avg FPS

E2200 with GT620:

800 x 600 (low preset) 67.9 avg FPS
1920 x 1080 (low preset) 18.3 avg FPS

Granted this comparison is somewhat Apples to Oranges, but I find it amazing that really old and low end Core 2 duo (2.2 Ghz with 1MB cache) with low end discrete GPU is doing so well against the top end AM1. Do keep in mind, however, that Tomb Raider doesn't scale well with quad core.

A strike against the Core 2 duo is that it is going to have much higher idle (and total) power consumption. However, it should be noted that the noise coming from my particular box isn't particularly loud.

 

[cbn]

Deleted.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Granted this comparison is somewhat Apples to Oranges, but I find it amazing that really old and low end Core 2 duo (2.2 Ghz with 1MB cache) with low end discrete GPU is doing so well against the top end AM1. Do keep in mind, however, that Tomb Raider doesn't scale well with quad core.

What did you expect? IPC of the Jaguar core is roughly on par with C2D, and the C2D does not have to share the memory bus with a GPU. The C2D also has a small frequency advantage.

Even the (retail) GT620 (GF108) has higher theoretical performance then the 128SP Kabini IGP.

 

[TopTenGamer]

I'm fairly new here so not sure if it's ok to rehash this old thread or not but as it inspired a recent PC build of mine I thought I'd see. I used the A4 7300 to build a $150 (more like $170 if you do the 8GB RAM) gaming computer and really think it does ok in terms of F2P games, Blizzard Games, Mobas, or popular games like CS GO.

I was hoping I could somehow fit in the A6 7400k Kaveri with R5 graphics, as the A4 7300 is Richland, for the budget, but it just wasn't there. I did find the 7400k for $59 so it might be something I do benchmarks of in the future.