Bristol Ridge officially for sale, spotted at Cotsco

superstition

Platinum Member
Feb 2, 2008
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http://techreport.com/news/30674/amd-am4-based-system-spotted-in-the-wild

the evocatively-named HP 510-P127C Pavilion desktop computer based on the HP "Willow" motherboard.

The HP Willow microATX motherboard is built around AMD's Promontory Fusion Controller Hub, bringing with it support for PCIe 3.0 and DDR4 memory. HP's motherboard support page details support for Bristol Ridge A8-9600, A10-9700, and A12-9800 APUs, all of which are quad-core 28-nm chips with 65W TDP. Some future Summit Ridge CPUs have TDPs up to 95W, though this board appears to be limited to 65W units.

The board offers a single PCIe x16 slot and and A-keyed M.2 slot, which seems to imply support for PCIe x2 SSDs. DDR4 memory as fast as 2133 MT/s is supported in configurations up to 16GB spread across two slots. The Willow motherboard is suspiciously lacking USB 3.1 ports, Type-C or otherwise.

The specific PC available at Costco includes a 1TB magnetic hard disk, 16GB of DDR4 memory at an unspecified clock speed, a top-of-the-line A12-9800 APU, an 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter, and a DVD recorder for just under $600.

Skylake seemed to be bottlenecked by 2133 DDR4. I love how almost no one seems to mention the latency when talking about DDR4.

18-Dirt3-DDR4_575px.png


However,

Hruska said:
The various caches on the CPU are designed to provide fast memory accesses and to limit the need to tap main memory in the first place. Meanwhile, bringing the memory controller on-die (as both AMD and Intel have done) slashed latency compared to previous systems. This diminishes the impact of reducing latency on the DRAM itself.

The end result of all these improvements is that DRAM clock rates rarely matter to desktop applications past a certain point. Additional layers of cache and sophisticated algorithms have blunted the impact of memory speed in the vast majority of cases.

The article has a pic of the motherboard.
 

Justinbaileyman

Golden Member
Aug 17, 2013
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I wonder if these will even post with some DDR4 2400 and down clock the memory or hopefully they can be overclocked so the memory controller will run high memory.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
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It's just an OEM system. They're probably shlepping DDR4-2133 to get it out of the parts bin. If support is limited to that speed it's probably due to the board and not the IMC.
 

waltchan

Senior member
Feb 27, 2015
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Saw it yesterday at Costco for $599.99, which is a fantastic price with 16GB DDR4 RAM and 2GB R7 graphics card. It uses A12-9800 processor based on Excavator architecture with a new AM4 socket. Future ready with lowest depreciation rate. I don't believe a separate R7 graphics card was necessary, considering how good the graphics are from APU processor.
 

Blue_Max

Diamond Member
Jul 7, 2011
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Saw it yesterday at Costco for $599.99, which is a fantastic price with 16GB DDR4 RAM and 2GB R7 graphics card. It uses A12-9800 processor based on Excavator architecture with a new AM4 socket. Future ready with lowest depreciation rate. I don't believe a separate R7 graphics card was necessary, considering how good the graphics are from APU processor.

Most likely they're talking about the APU video, not an actual "card". "R7 graphics" is a term used almost exclusively in the APU world for its IGP and rarely for cards which almost always have the GPU model number listed.
 
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waltchan

Senior member
Feb 27, 2015
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Most likely they're talking about the APU video, not an actual "card". "R7 graphics" is a term used almost exclusively in the APU world for its IGP and rarely for cards which almost always have the GPU model number listed.
It does have a PCI-slot separate installed R7 graphics card inside, which adds up cost for nothing. Personally, I would remove the graphics card and sell it for $75 on eBay or something, and use the APU graphics instead if I buy one. HDMI out on motherboard is covered and needs to be removed with a screwdriver.
 

Blue_Max

Diamond Member
Jul 7, 2011
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It does have a PCI-slot separate installed R7 graphics card inside, which adds up cost for nothing. Personally, I would remove the graphics card and sell it for $75 on eBay or something, and use the APU graphics instead if I buy one. HDMI out on motherboard is covered and needs to be removed with a screwdriver.

What a bonkers build HP... :confused2: If you're going to add in a card that negates the APU, why use the APU??? Maybe it's an R7-250 card and it's working in tandem? Anything higher, the APU is unused.

Wish someone could crack that case or check the control panel to find what "R7-class" card it is. No offense to you, but I seriously doubt there IS one if they're refusing to print which card is in there.
 

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
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What a bonkers build HP... :confused2: If you're going to add in a card that negates the APU, why use the APU??? Maybe it's an R7-250 card and it's working in tandem? Anything higher, the APU is unused.

AMD probably gave it to HP for very cheap or free. My guess is that it's the R7 240 DDR3, which yeah.
 

Blue_Max

Diamond Member
Jul 7, 2011
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Heh... since it's been officially frowned upon to take unfair advantage of Costco's return policy, if someone finds a demo out on the counter to play with, run some sort of benchmark test off a USB drive! :D
Heck - I'm surprised no one has already!

For that matter... someone should have benched and shared by now, even if just purchasing for themselves...
 

Raduque

Lifer
Aug 22, 2004
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This chip, being an APU, is not going to perform on-par with most desktop chips higher than say, an i3-6100?
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
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It should perform about the same CPU-wise as a Haswell i3 of the same clockspeed in any task that has four CPU-intensive threads (or more). Applications that can only spawn 2 or fewer CPU-intensive threads will probably favor the Haswell.