SPCR

I'm curious how well this would do when paired with a fanless R7 250. Presumably the APU can crossfire with the GPU - that would be good potential for quiet operation and decent performance.

Thanks for the review. Looks like a nice HTPC CPU. Also, I've read that you can overclock a bit on the system base clock and get A10-6800K stock levels of performance and still be within the 65W TDP.

Dual graphics/hybrid crossfire - there are some early benchmarks out there (Tom's, PCPerspective). With the new frame pacing as part of the driver, you can get some nice boosts over just an R7 250 or just the A8-7600. Some games are great, others still suffer stuttering issues. Could be early driver issues.

If you pair Kaveri with a GPU, does it still make any sense compared to an i3/same GPU?

Intel used to charge more for the CPU, but will equally consume less power when taxed. With former AMD APUs, the i3 was the overall winner in performance and efficiency, but lost out in the price department.

How close is this gap with Kaveri now?

Pappnaas wrote:If you pair Kaveri with a GPU, does it still make any sense compared to an i3/same GPU?

Intel used to charge more for the CPU, but will equally consume less power when taxed. With former AMD APUs, the i3 was the overall winner in performance and efficiency, but lost out in the price department.

How close is this gap with Kaveri now?

More probably that not, there's still no match: Steamroller improves Piledriver, but not by too much.
So if for example we give a look to that synthetic comparison:

http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/166/AM ... G3420.html

then we may argue that more probably that not when pairing both the CPUs with some basic GPU - like the Radeon 6570 used by SPCR in every CPU review - AMD offering couldn't offer about any advantage over Intel entry-level one (with reference to price, performance, and power draw), and even better, Intel should win hands down (to be fair, against a Core i3 maybe AMD could offer a slight and probably unjustifiable price advantage).

Pappnaas wrote:If you pair Kaveri with a GPU, does it still make any sense compared to an i3/same GPU?

Sure, if you are on a shoestring budget and want to do some gaming beyond what the iGP provides. There's a range of performance where adding an R7 graphics card is going to provide better fps on the A8 than the i3. At some point of resolution/game complexity/fps the CPU will become dominant and the i3 will do a better job. Don't know how much gfx card you have to add to get there, though.

No mention of HSA or Mantle?

ryboto wrote:No mention of HSA or Mantle?

Not here.
And to give you an answer to "Why?", here's a question:
What has to do HSA/Mantle with a computer noise level?
/sarcasm

#corrections
1st page, last image:

* EOL. Price of closet current comparative used.

You mean closest, not closet.





Also: Great article, but why take only the i5-2500k and not a newer i5?

nagi wrote:Also: Great article, but why take only the i5-2500k and not a newer i5?

And wouldn't it be fairer to compare these AMDs to similarly priced Intels, such as the Core i3-4130?

SPCR hasn't reviewed the i3 or i5 Haswells or IVB..just the i7's (as that's probably what Intel sent).