Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

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Jakoob
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Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by Jakoob » Fri May 16, 2014 10:22 am

Hi guys,
I've made some research over the week to find, whether Bay-Trail or AM1 will fit my needs. I'm comparing Intel Celeron J1900 vs AMD Athlon 5350. Here are some conclusions, however I'm not sure, if all of them are 100% right. I hope it might help you to decide...

CPU:
Both 4 cores, AMD slightly bigger frequency
In benchmarks, they are mostly equal (sometimes wins Athlon sometimes Celeron)
In case of AES, the Athlon beats Celeron hard due to native support
Athlon seems to be easy to overclock (2.05 to 2.5 with stock cooler)
Celeron has passive cooling, AMD active (but maybe no need for it, if there is a fan in the case)

GPU:
Both GPU integrated inside CPU
Radeon 8400 (R3) with 128 streams beats "Ivy Bridge" with 4 EU in games, but still the FPS is low for both
4K content is playable on both, on Radeon there might be some bugs now, but the performance potential should be there

SATA, HDMI, USB 3.0 and others
Celeron offers only 2x SATA 3.0 Gbps by default, more are added through chip
Athlon offers faster 2x SATA 6.0 Gbps by default, more are added through chip
HDMI and DisplayPort are 4K ready on AMD platform, for Intel I'm not sure (seems to be FullHD only)
USB 3.0 is supported for both, AMD seems to offer more ports
LAN is 1000 Mbps for both, generally Realtek is used, for Intel you can get sometimes Intel LAN
PCIe - AMD offers more lines (x4), Intel only (x1) ... may differ according board

Power consumption
Amount of used Watts STRONGLY depends on used PSU. Many reviews are presenting incorrect values, because editors used too strong PSUs. Optimal is to buy PicoPSU or find board with DC-in (ASRock has for both Intel and AMD)

Power consumption is similar for both
With ATX --- Idle 25 -30 W
With Pico --- Idle 10 -12 W

Conclusion
For me winner is AMD, because for similar price offers more "connectivity" and is 4K ready. In terms of performance or power consumption the results are close.

What Im going to buy
AMD Athlon 5350
ASRock AM1H-ITX
CRUCIAL Ballistix Tactical 4GB DDR3 1600 LP
Seasonic SSA-0901D-19/SSA-0901-19

Only issue seems to be, that the board offers only one SATA power connector and I have 4 drives (1x SSD, 2x WD RED 3 TB, 1x 5400 RPM 3,5" Hitachi. I will use it as NAS 24/7, so the WD RED drives will be added after boot and hopefully it won't burn the board :lol:

What is your opinion about Bay-Trail vs AM1? Which platform would you pick? Will my board burn?
Last edited by Jakoob on Fri May 16, 2014 1:33 pm, edited 2 times in total.

riklaunim
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by riklaunim » Fri May 16, 2014 12:52 pm

The strongest AM1 get better scores in benchmarks than J1900. As I use primarily Linux the problem free (and open source) Intel drivers are better choice than AMD (their driver can be very annoying sometimes :P), but if it actually works without problems over long period of time then it's not that much of a difference.

And you can put external graphics to that x1 on J1900 board (and x4 for AM1). Some transfer heavy games and apps won't be as fast as usual, but other will just work few % worse (more to come benchmarking in progress :P).

porkchop
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by porkchop » Fri May 16, 2014 4:16 pm

i pick amd, but only because i'm a sucker for them :)

a few points:
users have reported high temps on the power circuitry for the on board psu (full load, ssd only), the problem is that there's no actual rating for the thing so we don't know how hard we can push it. having said that, a few hdds are probably ok?
so far only asus mobos support overclocking, but they have bad efficiency.
4k is over hdmi/dp only and is 30hz, not sure if this is relevant.
someone on anand has used a cheapo 12v 3a wall wart with the asrock board and has got 8w idle! don't ask me why a 12v adapter worked, the electric stuff is over my head.
if beema is am1 too, then there's a good upgrade path.

my pick is the msi am1i, because it's cheap, i don't need the extra ports or the built in psu, and over most tests i've found it seems to be the most efficient.

washu
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by washu » Sat May 17, 2014 5:08 am

The cash-conscious home user in me says: The AM1 platform looks awesome for the price. It looks like a great HTPC option.

The sleep-deprived cynical sysadmin in me says: I've seen far to many "enterprise grade" AMD systems perform well below what even their low benchmark scores would indicate. Wait and see how AM1 performs in the real world.

Jakoob
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by Jakoob » Sat May 17, 2014 11:47 am

As for me, I need something power efficient, which will handle my:
1) downloads/uploads (1x 320 GB drive)
2) data backup of my family (2x 3 TB)
3) Log some traffic
4) Sometimes run some video or app

and that is it. Intel can do this as well, however AMD seems to do the same and offer something extra to it. Drivers aren't issue for me, because I will use Windows platform. Maybe for Linux users, AMD isn't the best choice...

gorkypl
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by gorkypl » Tue May 20, 2014 7:22 am

I had the same dilemma, and went the third way - Haswell.
The only, but also very important reason, was that I wanted to use ZFS as file system.

This implieds ECC ram, which is not possible on AM1. BayTrail motherboards with ECC are available, but they have about the same power consumption as Haswell in idle...

riklaunim
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by riklaunim » Tue May 20, 2014 7:50 am

gorkypl wrote:I had the same dilemma, and went the third way - Haswell.
The only, but also very important reason, was that I wanted to use ZFS as file system.

This implieds ECC ram, which is not possible on AM1. BayTrail motherboards with ECC are available, but they have about the same power consumption as Haswell in idle...
Atom Avaton could be for that, but the motherboards aren't cheap (especially if it's octa-core Atom)

gorkypl
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by gorkypl » Tue May 20, 2014 7:58 am

Yeah, when saying ECC BayTrail I meant Avoton, sorry.

Price of ECC-compatible mobo for Haswell + CPU is very similar to Avoton-based boards.
Also power consumption does not differ a lot - for this reason I went with Haswell.

gietrzy
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by gietrzy » Mon Jun 09, 2014 1:51 am

Jakoob wrote:Conclusion
For me winner is AMD, because for similar price offers more "connectivity" and is 4K ready.
What is your opinion about Bay-Trail vs AM1? Which platform would you pick? Will my board burn?
I chose Gigabyte J1900 DV3 with Windows 8.1/64. No regrets.
If you browse movie makers forums online you can find native files from GH4 which records 4K@100mbps. These files cannot be played smoothly using VLC/64. Just of out couriosity I did try playing them using biult-in Video app and voila :shock: Straight from the camcorder 4K files play smoothly.

So YT 1080 and 2160 are no problem for J1900 and this little Video app seal the 4K ready deal.
I have no intention to play any games so I prefer integrated graphics. Also I did have three motherboards based on Brazos (one Asrock, two Asus) and sometimes I could not properly instal drivers.
I should also mention that I have a rather fast ssd drive.

"More connectivity" is always welcomed but right now for me it means 10 GBps Ethernet infrastructure. I realy want to see it brought to the consumer level asap.

pressingonalways
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by pressingonalways » Mon Jun 23, 2014 12:36 pm

Great write up OP. So we know that idle is still the same power consumption for both haswell and these systems... What are we looking at in terms of the difference in price between building a haswell low power system and an AM1 or Bay-trail with similar components? If we're looking at the difference of 50 or 100 dollars and the haswell chips might win out in overall power consumption by being idle more often, it still doesn't seem to make too much sense to go with these types of chips unless you have power restrictions that keep you from topping out at the 40watts level or something.

washu
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by washu » Tue Jun 24, 2014 5:53 am

pressingonalways wrote:Great write up OP. So we know that idle is still the same power consumption for both haswell and these systems... What are we looking at in terms of the difference in price between building a haswell low power system and an AM1 or Bay-trail with similar components? If we're looking at the difference of 50 or 100 dollars and the haswell chips might win out in overall power consumption by being idle more often, it still doesn't seem to make too much sense to go with these types of chips unless you have power restrictions that keep you from topping out at the 40watts level or something.
You can get a haswell system for very close to the price of a higher end AM1 system or Bay-trail. A haswell Celeron (~$50) and a decent H81 board (~$60) gives you a much faster system for only ~$110. That would be a micro-ATX system, so add another ~$15 if you need mini-ITX.

In terms of power they wouldn't be that different. Intel's TDP ratings on the lower end haswells are no where near reality. I have a Pentium G3220 (53W TDP) on an MSI H81I with 2 X 2 GB and a single SSD. Maxed out (prime 95 + furmark) I get 37W from the wall. That is with a not very efficient brick + DC-DC power supply. A Celeron G18XX would probably be slightly better.

GnatGoSplat
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by GnatGoSplat » Thu Jul 17, 2014 7:48 am

Would the power consumption of a Haswell system be close to a 5350 or J1900 while playing HD video?
I'm thinking about upgrade paths for my HTPCs. The low power consumption of one of these systems sounds pretty nice for an HTPC, but if power consumption is the same while playing HD video, there really isn't any benefit to using an SoC instead of Haswell.

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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Sat Jul 26, 2014 1:33 am

the amd solution is much more elegant as well as dirt cheap. 4 cores will have a better overall experience than 2 any day. The price is so low, it is crazy. and amd boards have much more cool crap on them always.

i dont even know why people compare them. I guess linux support is a tad less. I cant imagine it wont be updated though rather instantly. 4 cores on amd64 linux would be sweet. be a rocking little machine.

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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by xan_user » Sat Jul 26, 2014 7:02 am

I will jump on the AMD bandwagon too. been an intel guy since 98, but built a dirt cheap budget PC for a friend that's looking for a job, and that little thing smoked. my next personal rig will probably be AMD.

El_Jefe_of_NY
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by El_Jefe_of_NY » Tue Jul 29, 2014 4:56 pm

I am building an AM1 system for my parents. The low wattage plus 4 cores and the superior graphics card means that it could only improve as things are written for more multithreaded applications.

I am hoping it is enough for their uses. Everyone says it makes a great media center. I dont think they will do anything other than HD skype and stream HD netflix or Blu-ray at most on this thing. That and youtube hd and looking at puppies :)

GnatGoSplat
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by GnatGoSplat » Wed Jul 30, 2014 5:37 am

I ended up going with the 5350 as well. Got the 5350 w/Gigabyte AM1M-S2H motherboard in a combo for $70 shipped.
It works quite well as an HTPC. I don't really notice any difference between it and the Athlon II X2 250 w/880G motherboard that it replaced, except for using 30W less power while playing HD video.
It does use 40W at the outlet when playing HD video, but that's with a dual ATSC PCIe tuner card, an antique Pioneer DVD slot drive w/IDE to SATA adapter, VFD, USB BT dongle, 5GHz wireless USB dongle, 3.5" HDD, and a presumably inefficient Antec Basiq 350W ATX PSU.

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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Sun Aug 03, 2014 1:24 am

that's a sweet deal. jeez.

GnatGoSplat
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Re: Bay-Trail vs AM1 (and the winner is...)

Post by GnatGoSplat » Sun Aug 03, 2014 10:52 am

Yeah, I wish they'd offer that combo promo again as I wouldn't mind having another for my the projector HTPC in the basement. It was from Tigerdirect.

I did pick up an Asrock Q1900M to try in my wife's exercise room HTPC. Had a $10 cashback promo I wanted to use, so ended up picking that up for $60. Not near a good a deal as the TD promo though.

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