AMD APU Good or bad

[Darren]

I was wondering what people thought of them. I hear mixed views

[rotNdude]

What's your budget for a PC? What are you using it for?

[Potatoes]

Depends on your usage. It's quite low-medium range, not really suitable for any modern games. Quite honestly, AMD hasn't made any real progress with CPUs recently. I'd recommend looking for i3 or i5 if you are into any real gaming (what's your budget though?).

[D4rk]

Depends on your components, if you can't afford a dedicated GPU then they're great depending on which one you get but if you have a dedicated GPU then i see no reason why people get them

[Darren]

Actually I have a Intel core i5 2310 sandy Bridge. I was being noisy to find out what people actually thought.

Because anything AMD releases is jumped upon being rubbish even from people who have never tried a AMD processor.

[Meurock460]

Originally posted by Darren:

Actually I have a Intel core i5 2310 sandy Bridge. I was being noisy to find out what people actually thought.

Because anything AMD releases is jumped upon being rubbish even from people who have never tried a AMD processor.

They aren't powerful CPUs, but the onboard graphics are alright. Not better than a good dedicated GPU of course, but as far as onboard graphics go the APU is quite good in that department. Lower demanding games like MC, source games and older stuff like F.E.A.R will run quite well.

That said I wouldn't use one for gaming unless one had an extremely tight budget (like £300 for example). They are also good for general usage and make great HTPCs, particularly in very small cases that cannot fit a dedicated GPU.

[SundownKid]

That CPU you have now should still be decent. Dont get an APU, get a new graphics card.

[Gadmt_]

I have an AMD A10-5800K and it works great! I am even able to emulate PCSX2 and Dolphin! So an AMD A10- 7870K shouldn't really hurt.

[Zoid Bacon]

Meurock372 has it pretty accurate. AMD's current line of APUs are great choices if you are gaming on a very tight budget, or if you are building an HTPC or other media-flavored home computer. The onboard graphics are certainly much better than what you get in other processors, and are capable of playing older games with ease and even some modern games on low settings.

They aren't good choices for serious gaming (where a dedicated GPU is required), or for heavy computing work, but in their price range they can be good choices to consider.

[vadim]

Originally posted by Darren:

I was wondering what people thought of them.

Look at AMD financial results and you will know what people thinks.

[ee]

thay are quite fun to build unless you're using an asus motherboard (asus makes great am3 boards, but has lousy firmware for fm2). get fast 2133 memory and they make great linux steam boxes and 8gb quad core workstations for under 300 usd.

[vadim]

Originally posted by ee:

they make great linux steam boxes and 8gb quad core workstations for under 300 usd.

Linux == Nvidia. In worst case, Intel IGP. Because Linux Intel's video drivers support only OpenGL 3.3. AMD cannot be used for Linux, because of the lack of decent drivers.
"Workstation with AMD CPU" sounds funny. Its an oxymoron.

[ee]

I don't think Intel has any viable IGP offerings in a reasonable price range. I tried the i5 4200 and it was worthless for gaming.

It's true that fglrx driver can be a pain to install if you're using custom kernels or if you want to install the latest ATI driver; that's a problem I ran into once.

Not many use custom kernels though or need to have the very latest driver. If you're using the ones supplied by Mint (and I believe Ubuntu) then there is no problem. Select the proprietary driver if it isn't already selected, and install Steam from the Mint Software center. So, if you don't do funny stuff and let the Mint or Ubuntu developers deal with the driver headaches, you should be good to go.

I've been using the fglrx driver fine to run Steam and steam games that clearly require a GPU and GL (eg Kerbal, Cities in Motion 2) for my 4 year old A8 Llano laptop. I'm now building an A8-7650 desktop so I can run X plane; it's something my current laptop just won't handle.

[vadim]

Originally posted by ee:

I've been using the fglrx driver fine to run Steam and steam games that clearly require a GPU and GL (eg Kerbal, Cities in Motion 2)

Read wine developers forum.

[[AU] Tabris:DarkPeace]

The AMD APU used in the PlayStation 4 is x86-64 compatible and leaves ALL OF THEIR desktop and mobile APU's in the dust.

It is a wonder why they don't develop a serious gaming x86-64 platform around their PlayStation 4 and Xbox One APU (CPU and GPU integrated).

It has pretty darn good performance, and the CPU is quite excellent for a 1.60GHz to 1.75GHz part. It can execute up to EIGHT floating point operations per clock cycle, which is heaps more than even the Intel Core i5/i7 can do (as far as I am aware, using SANDRA MFLOPS/MIPS benchmarks to go off of).

[vadim]

Originally posted by TabrisDarkPeace:

It is a wonder why they don't develop a serious gaming x86-64 platform around their PlayStation 4 and Xbox One APU (CPU and GPU integrated).

Sorry, but this is impossible. 8-core Jaguar architectire. Low clock rate + IPC < 2 (neither decoder, no EUs doesn't support more than 2 mop per cycle). Only games which are specially optimized to run on such computer can be used. Including low-level IGP programming.