Newegg has refurb Llano A6-3600 FM1 APUs! (2.1/2.4Ghz, 65W, FM1)

[VirtualLarry]

And there are some new / new other A55 and A75 mobos on ebay, some with HDMI and UEFI support. ("Win8 ready", which in my experience means Win10 runs great on them too.)

The biggest flaw with this sort of setup, is the same with the G3258 Hswell CPU - the HDMI port only does 1080P. (I have 4K UHD displays, so this sucks for me.)

Other than that, these make nice little web-browsing boxes with an SSD. (ProTip: A55 only supports SATAII, you need A75 for SATA6 / USB3.)

And DDR3 RAM is trending a bit lower than DDR4.

 

[whm1974]

At this point in time why bother with Llano CPUs? Unless you can build a PC using such parts fairly cheap and are giving to someone who can't afford a computer, I really don't see the point of this.
EDIT:
Can you build cheaper then this?
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/6LwcQV

 

[ao_ika_red]

Unless you can build a PC using such parts fairly cheap and are giving to someone who can't afford a computer

Imo, that's his whole point. Less than $30 APU, some 4 or 8GB sticks, used A75 board, and low end 120GB SSD will be a more-than-capable daily use machine. Its low power requirement also means cheaper psu and cooling solution.

 

[whm1974]

Imo, that's his whole point. Less than $30 APU, some 4 or 8GB sticks, used A75 board, and low end 120GB SSD will be a more-than-capable daily use machine. Its low power requirement also means cheaper psu and cooling solution.

I suppose that will be better then nothing for those who can't afford anything more.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Can you build cheaper then this?
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/6LwcQV

Yeah, these Llano rigs I've been building, are below $200 in parts costs.

 

[ao_ika_red]

I suppose that will be better then nothing for those who can't afford anything more.

It's cheaper and more powerful than buying a low cost (atom or puma based) laptop. Good for those new into computer world. And also, as software are getting into multithreading, even low-ipc quad core cpu could get a new lease of life.

 

[VirtualLarry]

even low-ipc quad core cpu

The thing is, they're not even that "low IPC". Maybe compared to Skylake / Kaby Lake / Coffee Lake, sure. But they're under $25 for a freaking quad-core. That's AM1 pricing territory, but with higher clocks, and much higher IPC than FM1.

In fact, Llano has higher IPC than Athlon II / Phenom II, which was around Core2 IPC, which is higher than BullDozer / PileDriver IPC too.

I would say IPC is comparable to Ivy Bridge, maybe, maybe Sandy, but with an iGPU that's competitive with Haswell.

Unfortunately, clocks on LLano are low. If they were in the 3-4Ghz range, they would be even more competitive chips, even today. But at 2.1-3.0, they're hardly competitive with modern offerings.

Thankfully, though, with the powerful iGPU, and the yet-to-be-personally-tested quad-core ability, these should be decent browsing machines, much better than my 1.3Ghz AM1 ("low-IPC") Sempron 3850 APUs. Although, those cost me $20.

These are basically comparable to 45nm Core2Quads in IPC, with a MUCH better iGPU, than GMA950, x3100, Sandy Bridge, and even Ivy Bridge's iGPU (IMHO, I could be biased, I haven't used an Ivy Bridge iGPU in a while).

The dual-core A4-3420 2.8Ghz FM1 APUs I had, did hit 100% CPU usage while browsing, fairly often, so they could stand to be clocked a bit higher, but with an SSD, they're fairly decent, if you haven't been exposed to something like a Ryzen R5 1600 with a powerful dGPU and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. That'll spoil anyone.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Imo, that's his whole point. Less than $30 APU, some 4 or 8GB sticks, used A75 board, and low end 120GB SSD will be a more-than-capable daily use machine.

Oh, and closer to $25 for the APU (I paid $14.50 on ebay for my A4-3420 APUs, and like $9 for my A4-3300 APUs). I also use 2x2GB DDR3-1600 (been buying Kingston sticks with good results, look for New 2x2GB kits on ebay, for $20-30. Dual-channel is important for FM1, while at the same time, keeping expenses low.)
And I use "new" or more likely "new other" boards, if I can, rather than just "used". Even for giveaway PCs, I don't feel that comfortable giving them a "used" board that could die any day. Bad for the reputation. At the worst, *factory* refurbs, which are in theory tested by a competent tech.

 

[ao_ika_red]

I would say IPC is comparable to Ivy Bridge, maybe, maybe Sandy, but with an iGPU that's competitive with Haswell.

It should be between Nehalem and Sandy in CPU ipc and better than Haswell's Pentium igpu. And this TeraScale2 should be able to taste AMD's Crimson beta driver which was released back in 2015. Am I right?

But, I get your point. Anything better than Penryn is enough for day-to-day use.

 

[VirtualLarry]

It should be between Nehalem and Sandy in CPU ipc and better than Haswell's Pentium igpu. And this TeraScale2 should be able to taste AMD's Crimson beta driver which was released back in 2015. Am I right?

That's pretty accurate, I think.

Heck, even Penryn is probably adequate for browsing these days (at least, the quads), but the problem with those generations of CPUs, is that they were saddled with really poor-performing chipset IGPs. Some of them couldn't even decode 1080P video codecs.

Edit: These FM1 APUs, I believe, will decode 1080P H.264 videos, but will not do 4K VP9 or HEVC (actually, no VP9 or HEVC fully in hardware, although modern AMD drivers might have a "hybrid" decode mode for 1080P).

That's a really strong argument (that I made in my other thread) advocating FOR the Kaby Lake Pentiums (and possibly Celerons, although I don't think that I've used a KBL Celeron at all, and I don't know if their media-decoding support is any less than the KBL Pentiums), because they can decode 4K VP9 and HEVC, basically they can decode pretty-much any common codec used on the 'net today, whereas the FM1 APUs only decode the older standards. I don't know how that will work with YouTube, if it will serve only H.264 videos to these APUs, or if they will try to decode the VP9 videos in software on the quad-core FM1 APUs, and potentially drop frames?

The problem with building entry-level KBL Pentium boxes is, the cheapest KBL Pentium, the G4560 was $61-64 street-priced, but now commands $90+, and the cheapest B250 board that supports the KBL Pentium out-of-the-box is like $50-60, plus DDR4 will cost big $$$ just for a 2x4GB kit, which is generally the smallest kit that allows for dual-channel, to maximize the performance of the iGPU for video-decoding.

 

[ao_ika_red]

Well, one thing I know, I still can watch youtube on my T6570 (C2D laptop w/ GMA 4500MHD) but limited to laptop's 720p screen res.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Did AMD ever have any Mobile LLano chips? Something 35W, or possibly below that? I don't remember.

I remember the "Turion Mobile", basically Athlon II shrunk down in wattage as much as possible, and thrown in a laptop. Those chips were hot slow pigs, I think. Much like trying to fit a Pentium 4 into a laptop. AMD didn't have much of anything low-power enough to stick into a laptop, until Beema.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

It should be between Nehalem and Sandy in CPU ipc and better than Haswell's Pentium igpu. And this TeraScale2 should be able to taste AMD's Crimson beta driver which was released back in 2015. Am I right?

I wouldn't recommend trying that. The Crimson beta driver breaks things left and right for TeraScale GPUs. You're basically stuck with the Windows 10 provided Catalyst (15.7 far as I remember).

TeraScale GPU are effectively EOL at this point.

 

[frozentundra123456]

You arent considering the cost of a windows license and a monitor. Larry, I am sure you probably have those on hand, but unless one does, the value proposition quickly goes out the door. And you are dealing with old hardware with I assume no warranty. Just doesnt make sense to me, except for the fun of tinkering with old hardware. Laptops are expensive now on Newegg, but if one watches carefully for sales, I think you should be able to get an i3 laptop for around 350.00 at Staples, Best Buy, or some other big box store. That makes a lot more sense to me, or even a chromebook for two hundred bucks for a "web browsing" machine.

 

[NTMBK]

Larry, what is the point of these systems? According to Geekbench results, they're slower than a Pentium N5000 laptop in both single and multithreaded results.

 

[ao_ika_red]

I wouldn't recommend trying that. The Crimson beta driver breaks things left and right for TeraScale GPUs. You're basically stuck with the Windows 10 provided Catalyst (15.7 far as I remember).

TeraScale GPU are effectively EOL at this point.

Thanks for your feedback. I won't recommend it anymore to my friends who still had TS2 based mobile gpu on their laptop.

 

[SPBHM]

if the llano IGP behave like the discrete cards, the video decoding is only good up to 720P60/1080P50 for youtube (avc1), at 1080P60 it's broken, so I just disable the GPU decode on those cards and let the CPU do the work to watch 1080P60, which in this case, I'm not sure this CPU can handle, probably not.

but maybe the llano video block was updated compared to the other terascale 2 radeons

 

[Roger Wilco]

My laptop has an A6-3400m. It does basic tasks just fine, and it ran Banished just fine lol.

 

[Jan Olšan]

In fact, Llano has higher IPC than Athlon II / Phenom II, which was around Core2 IPC, which is higher than BullDozer / PileDriver IPC too.

I would say IPC is comparable to Ivy Bridge, maybe, maybe Sandy, but with an iGPU that's competitive with Haswell.

It should be between Nehalem and Sandy in CPU ipc

Definitely not! The IPC is still quite close to Phenom II - or actually, Athlon II. Llano has no L3 cache, so in some scenarios like games, it is going to be slower. Definitely not close to Nehalem and Sandy Bridge is out of the question completely. You can mostly consider Llano to be equal to Athlon II. A complication with both is that they don't support SIMD instructions like SSE4 and particularly SSSE3 that are very useful for multimedia.

Also the problem with these chips you mention is the really low clock, just 2.1 base/2.4 turbo, that is way too little. And I am not sure how well Llano's turbo works and I am not sure if these SKUs can be reliably overclocked much, because they are locked and you would have to raise BCLK.

If you could buy the A6-3650 and preferably A8-3850 (or A8-3870K?), than that would be different business, since those clock higher and get quite a good performance. I have been using A8-3850 for a long time. But these chips around 2GHz are IMHO not worth it that much, IMHO, not in the world where people mostly care about single-thread speed.
Also, I would still buy them only for upgrading of existing systems with FM1 mobos, not for new builds.

 

[whm1974]

You arent considering the cost of a windows license and a monitor. Larry, I am sure you probably have those on hand, but unless one does, the value proposition quickly goes out the door. And you are dealing with old hardware with I assume no warranty. Just doesnt make sense to me, except for the fun of tinkering with old hardware. Laptops are expensive now on Newegg, but if one watches carefully for sales, I think you should be able to get an i3 laptop for around 350.00 at Staples, Best Buy, or some other big box store. That makes a lot more sense to me, or even a chromebook for two hundred bucks for a "web browsing" machine.

I was thinking of the cost of Windows and a display for a cheap build would push the cost up. I agree that an i3 based laptop or even a cheap Chromebook might be a better solution for most people who can't afford a computer.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

It's cheaper and more powerful than buying a low cost (atom or puma based) laptop. Good for those new into computer world. And also, as software are getting into multithreading, even low-ipc quad core cpu could get a new lease of life.

For < $200, pretty sure you can pick up a used ThinkPad T500 - 530.
See them all day, everyday on CL here in DFW.

 

[DaveSimmons]

For a desktop, wouldn't an off-lease Dell / Lenovo / HP make more sense for most people? $50-200 total cost including Windows license, though only 3 days left for the "accessibility hack" upgrade to Windows 10.

 

[kwalkingcraze]

(I paid $14.50 on ebay for my A4-3420 APUs.

It's now $5.90. Bought two last month.

 

[Spjut]

I have the A8 3870k with 8GB RAM servicing as my parents' HTPC. Netflix works just fine in 1080p, never tried forcing youtube to run VP9 though.
My own HTPC is just a Q8200, 7GB RAM and GT 610. Even able to play Dolphin decently.

Anyway, older PCs are obviously still fine, and if it's not, chances are just getting a somewhat modern GPU will make it fine again. But if I hadn't had those parts lying around, I would have gotten a cheap new Intel system instead.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Larry, what is the point of these systems? According to Geekbench results, they're slower than a Pentium N5000 laptop in both single and multithreaded results.

What's an N5000? Is that even released yet? The newest one that I know of that I've seen in mini-PCs, is an N4200 Apollo Lake CPU. I know that Intel is coming out with a newer generation, I assume that the N5000 is that? Where can you find mini-PCs with that CPU? I might pick one up "for science".