Performance preview of Gigabyte's A75M-UD2H and AMD A8-3850 APU
Although we can't publish any actual benchmarks as yet, what we have for you is a quick preview of Gigabyte's upcoming A75M-UD2H motherboard alongside AMD's A8-3850 APU running Crysis 2 with a bit of a twist, or two. Click on through for a short video and some details on how to overclock an APU.
In all fairness, we didn't do the overclocking, but we'll let you guess who did it, but if you have a look at the video you'll see Crysis 2 running on AMD's A8-8350 APU at 30-40fps. The run is only using the built in Radeon HD 6550D GPU, although neither is running at stock speed. To the story goes that we saw the setup hitting 60fps, but the system wasn't 100 percent stable with the air cooler used and as such we weren't able to grab any video of this.
The CPU core of the A8-3850 was overclocked from 2.9GHz to 3.38GHz in this specific case running on a 22.5x multiplier at a 150MHz bus while being feed 1.48V. Note that the CPU was still going faster The IGP was overclocked from 600MHz to 900MHz at stock Voltage. In all fairness some rather extreme memory was fitted in the system which consisted of a pair of G.Skill modules running at 2,400MHz CL9-11-9-27, but keep in mind that these were 1600MHz CL6 modules that were overclocked. Finally a 64GB Kingston SSD and a Zalman CNPS11X Extreme CPU cooler rounded off the system.
That's some pretty impressive stuff, but with better cooling AMD's APUs can be pushed even faster. Do keep in mind that the video wasn't recorded under ideal conditions and as mentioned above, it can perform even better. However, we've left out one little mention; while the APU was running Crysis 2 it was also running Linpack (LinX 0.6.4) on two of the CPU cores so in fact you're looking at only half of the CPU power available for the game to play and this is why the four cores are nearly maxed out during the demo run in the video.
YouTube - ‪Gigabyte GA-A75M-UD2H and AMD A8-3850 APU‬‏
So ok, Crysis 2 was “only” running in 1280x800 resolution, but how often have you seen an IGP that can play the latest game titles at a playable frame rate? AMD isn't going to beat Intel in terms of CPU performance with Llano, but the entire package is very impressive and we can see this becoming a huge hit with the mainstream consumer, as they get a more than capable CPU core paired with an IGP that will actually allow them to pretty much everything they'd want to, at an affordable price level. Marketed right, AMD could easily take over the entry-level and mainstream market space from Intel, but we'll have to wait and see some real benchmarks before we draw any final conclusions.
Performance preview of Gigabyte's A75M-UD2H and AMD A8-3850 APU
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