yay more trinity reviews!

i especially appreciate the chipset and vrm temps, there are some tiny chipset heatsinks out there but that doesn't seem to be a big an issue now. the bare vrms on budget boards though are a little troubling, not so much for the actual temps but their negative impact on efficiency.

the 172w dc power consumption for the a8-3850 llano, is there a discrete gpu in there?
it's crazy high for a 100w tdp cpu/apu!

I haven't seen any one do any reviews on the quality of the video that is produced by these new chips. I think I read that they do OK with rendering the various frame rates and digital audio, but what about how good the video looks.

I know the latter can be a bit subjective, but I know you guys have done some of this testing before. So while quietness is important, it also has to yield acceptable video quality.

Any word?

Hi,

thank you for a great review. I am especially happy for the though analysis of Fan Xpert 2 - of course.

/Casper

CA_Steve,
Yep, that's the report I read. BUT, all their testing was quantitative (HQV, dropped frames, etc.). They never sat back and said, "Hmmm, all the numbers are there and on our <awesome HDTV> the image looks <awesome, great, OK, horrible, turn the dog around/shave it's rear/have it walk backwards>."

While the number from those tests will give a really good idea on how the resulting image will be, how does it really look with the Mark1 Mod 0 Eyeball (military term for your eye). Yeah, it's subjective a bit because everyone is a little different. But for professional reviewers, I think that subjectiveness is also a good metric.

Just my 2cents. I asked the same thing from Anand. Am I asking too much from reviewers?

My take-away was: for most users, it'll do/look great for video picture quality. For a few specific tasks, there's some work to be done on the driver. The graphics in Trinity are HD 6xxx architecture. Those GPUs, and really, even the gen before did well for HT viewing.

Many Thanks for an excellent review, particularly the detailed power consumption figures!

Very much looking forward to further reviews of FM2 matx motherboards, as it's been a while since the Trinity APU came out, but haven't seen many motherboards or reviews as compared to the abundant reviews for the z77 chipset.

I find power consumption (and sata benchmarks) one of the most important factors when looking at motherboards, e.g. take a look at the H77 and Z77 motherboard benchmarks here and how radically different the power figures are (using and i7 3770k) : -
http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/2907/8/ ... onsumption

Amazing.

Would be nice to compare this with the Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H. I have reservations about the Gigabyte due to their (typical) lack of heatsinks for the VRM's (which was a problem for the Phenom boards).