I'm about two years out of date

[Ruptga]

Does anyone care to bring me up to speed on the market in general in about a paragraph? At this point I don't really know where my knowledge is lacking.

I do know some about Ivy Bridge and just a little about Haswell.

This probably should have gone in General Hardware, but I derped a little.

 

[alcoholbob]

If you don't care about power saving, and you aren't doing number crunching/3d work, your next upgrade is coming in maybe 5 years--assuming you alreadt have nephalem or sandy bridge.

 

[Remobz]

Does anyone care to bring me up to speed on the market in general in about a paragraph? At this point I don't really know where my knowledge is lacking.

I do know some about Ivy Bridge and just a little about Haswell.

Are you asking in regards to buying a new system or just want general up to date knowledge?

 

[UNhooked]

SB<IB<Haswell. Difference in performance negligible unless you are coming from 1156 socket and older.

I upgraded from i5 750 skt 1156 to i7 3820 due to the need to run 3 GPUs.

The IB in my sig was because of crazy sale at Microcenter and Frys during Black Friday. Needless to say I got the cpu and mobo for $150 or so. If not for the sale I would have stuck with my trusty Xeon X 3240 ( basically an i5 750)

 

[Ruptga]

Are you asking in regards to buying a new system or just want general up to date knowledge?

Some of both, but mostly the latter. I'm happy with my system, but my wife is considering replacing her increasingly buggy laptop. We would probably be getting a mainstream desktop scratch/dent or refurb and upgrading the GPU if we decide now is a decent time to upgrade. My issue is mostly that I'm just out of touch with the market as a whole.

For example, I'd expect it would be best to wait until about a month after Haswell is introduced so we can get a better price on a mainstream Ivy Bridge, but is a price drop even coming? What speeds and quantities of memory are typical these days? Are SSDs more mainstream in regards to capacity and pricing now? Are developers actually utilizing quad cores with HT, or is single-core performance still the main thing to consider?

 

[lakedude]

Are developers actually utilizing quad cores with HT, or is single-core performance still the main thing to consider?

That depends entirely on which applications you are running. Some apps make excellent use of multiple cores and others are almost entirely single threaded. What exactly is the computer in question going to be use for?

 

[Ruptga]

That depends entirely on which applications you are running. Some apps make excellent use of multiple cores and others are almost entirely single threaded. What exactly is the computer in question going to be use for?

Most likely, the most intensive thing being run will be WoW. She plays other things, but has never cared much for FPS so performance isn't a huge deal. But, it might matter more if she goes back into graphic (website) design. Also she loves her RPGs.

 

[vampirr]

Most likely, the most intensive thing being run will be WoW. She plays other things, but has never cared much for FPS so performance isn't a huge deal. But, it might matter more if she goes back into graphic (website) design. Also she loves her RPGs.

If you don't want to spend much money on laptop there are good laptops with AMD's APU's. Mostly OEM's put lame 1600mhz RAM with only 4Gb rather than 1866mhz and 8gb to see maximum performance of APU's GPU and CPU.

 

[Ruptga]

APUs are something I forgot about entirely, they were still pretty new when I was last in the loop. I'll have to look up some benchmarks on those.

 

[vampirr]

APUs are something I forgot about entirely, they were still pretty new when I was last in the loop. I'll have to look up some benchmarks on those.

Liano is old, now you have Trinity but Richland laptops will be out soon. Richland suppors 2133mhz RAM and has 20% better GPU than Trinity, desktop APU's are decent and with hybrid crossfirex you can play Battlefield 3 at 1080p45fpsMedium with configuration A10 5700/5800k 1866mhz CL9 DDR3 Radeon HD 6670 1gb DDR3.

Mainstream games mostly have great support for crossfire, good builds for cheap ass xD Anyway APU's consume very little for the performance. The CPU is onpar with Ivy i3 but depending on model how much core's it has the APU.

 

[Sleepingforest]

Trinity/Richland is nice for mobile, since you can get passable GPU performance and the energy footprint is pretty small. For a general undemanding user, Trinity is probably the best mobile option.

On desktop though, if your hardware budget is better than $600 or so, it's better to go with a normal CPU (Intel i3-3220 or AMD FX-6300 at the lower end) plus a dedicated graphics card. More CPU/GPU power, and you dont have to deal with weird Crossfire issues.

 

[HopJokey]

If you don't care about power saving, and you aren't doing number crunching/3d work, your next upgrade is coming in maybe 5 years--assuming you alreadt have nephalem or sandy bridge.

Been playing Diablo 3 much?

 

[Ruptga]

I'm at work right now and don't remember what exactly her current specs are, but comparing AMD's current mobile stuff to my 2 year old desktop is hardly flattering to AMD. It looks like a A10-4600M would be about 20% slower than an i5 2300... if the i5 only had two cores. Its graphics performance looks to be a quarter of a HD6750, which is also two years old.

I realize mobile and desktop parts are completely different, but it seems to me that a current mainstream laptop shouldn't get raped by a two year old then-mainstream desktop.

The desktop APUs seem to be a lot more interesting.

 

[vampirr]

I'm at work right now and don't remember what exactly her current specs are, but comparing AMD's current mobile stuff to my 2 year old desktop is hardly flattering to AMD. It looks like a A10-4600M would be about 20% slower than an i5 2300... if the i5 only had two cores. Its graphics performance looks to be a quarter of a HD6750, which is also two years old.

I realize mobile and desktop parts are completely different, but it seems to me that a current mainstream laptop shouldn't get raped by a two year old then-mainstream desktop.

Its a cheap solution. 300-400$ laptop

A desktop APU at 720p can play Bioshock Infinite at High settings... A10 5800k. Richland will have better GPU.

APU's are focused on GPU and not CPU... APU CPU is a Piledriver without L3 Cache.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Most likely, the most intensive thing being run will be WoW. She plays other things, but has never cared much for FPS so performance isn't a huge deal. But, it might matter more if she goes back into graphic (website) design. Also she loves her RPGs.

For a desktop as someone else said an i3 or FX6300 with a mid level discrete card would be the lowest I would go. I would not even consider an APU on the desktop if I were at all interested in gaming. The AMD APU fans are going to strongly disagree with this position, but even a low end card like a HD7750 or HD7770 will be 50 to 100 percent faster than any apu on the market. Just too many compromises when it is so easy to add a discrete card to a desktop. Even a prebuilt with an i3 or i5 and a crappy power supply could handle a HD7750 and would blow away any APU.

If you want a laptop at the 500 dollar level, and are willing to have fairly limited gaming performance, an AMD A10 would be about the only choice. It should handle WoW at 768p laptop resolutions. If you are willing to go to the 1000.00 range, look for a quad core i7 and a GT650m or 660M. Just be sure to get the GDDR5 version of the graphics card.

Edit: by mid range card, I mean something like a HD7770, although many posters would consider anything below HD7850 low end.

 

[Sleepingforest]

A desktop APU can not play Bioshock at 720p well. A 7770 gets 43.8 frames per second on high at 1080p and consistently doubles (usually more than doubles) the framerate of the Trinity APU. Even assuming perfect scaling with pixel density, that means that the APU gets 40ish frames per second on high in DX10, no AA or other details. That's... playable, but definitely far from good. Things will look pretty blocky and a bit jerky.

 

[vampirr]

Check this guy channel to see some results from A10 5800k...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbkJHB6jDd8

OK, you got a vacation for the endless Youtube videos, and AMD salesman crap.
KNOCK it OFF or another vacation is in your future.
Markfw900
Anandtech Moderator.

 

[Sleepingforest]

And he gets exactly the results I'm talking about: roughly 40 frames per second on high. I'm personally very sensitive to lower framerates and hate jagged edges, so it seems unacceptable to me. But I suppose everyone will draw the line of "unacceptable" a bit differently.

 

[Ruptga]

Now that she has texted me her current specs, I have some perspective. Right now she has a mobile q720, a quad at 1.6ghz, and a HD5650M. So, if we took the super-cheap desktop route and got a A10-5800k system with no discrete graphics the graphics would be about 30% better, and the CPU would be about 60% better. She isn't a very demanding user, so that option is pretty tempting.

 

[Sleepingforest]

On mobile for undemanding users, Trinity is perfect, especially since it's an upgrade over what she has in every way. Make sure you get a decent screen/keyboard though--those can make or break a laptop experience.

 

[myocardia]

Nobody who has ever played World of Warcraft would even consider buying an AMD CPU: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/62 It has always been that way, and most likely will always be that way, for whatever reason.

 

[Sleepingforest]

Nobody who has ever played World of Warcraft would even consider buying an AMD CPU: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/62 It has always been that way, and most likely will always be that way, for whatever reason.

Wait, the A10 gets 73 frames per second (which is probably the most relevant product to this discussion of APUs). Am I missing something?

 

[myocardia]

Wait, the A10 gets 73 frames per second (which is probably the most relevant product to this discussion of APUs). Am I missing something?

Obviously, you are. Count how many non-AMD CPU's are above the absolute fastest AMD CPU. This game is one of the most CPU-bound games ever released. The fastest AMD processor is slower in this one game than every single quad-core that Intel has released in the past 3 years. It's even behind the i3 2100, from 2 years ago. As a matter of fact, it just barely even beats the $60 Pentium G850. World of Warcraft is NOT AMD's game, and never has been. This is not a new story, by any means.

edit: *$80 Pentium G850

 

[Sleepingforest]

But unless you're trying to play as more than one character at a time or want more than 60 frames per second, it doesn't seem to matter. 60 is about the limited of most monitors anyway.

Yes, Intel CPUs are better. But for the user in this case, it won't make a difference.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Wait, the A10 gets 73 frames per second (which is probably the most relevant product to this discussion of APUs). Am I missing something?

I dont see the conditions, but since that is a test of many cpus, a lot without an igp, the results must be with a powerful discrete card. This is not gaming on the igp.

I have no doubt an A10 with a discrete card would play WoW, but as the other poster said, that particular game strongly favors intel, so the A10 would not be my choice with a discrete card.