A6 3500

[Attila the Bun]

I'm doing a low cost internet browsing / word processing / media player build which initially was going to be a based on the AMD 460 tri-core. But due to a lack of stock I'm now going to use a Llano A6 3500 as on the face of it it is very similar in performance and cost and allows me to keep the costs to just over £250 without OS.

I was doing some investigations on the 3500 and there were a number of articles that speculated that it might be possible to unlock the 4th core. Further investigations failed to turn up anybody that claimed success. Has anyone managed this?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AFAIK,core unlocking is not possible with the FM1 platform.

[Attila the Bun]

Thanks Cat,
By the way...also thanks for your monthly guide...it was the basis for this build and I must admit I'm looking forward it more than the others I've done simply because I'd like to see how good an APU build can be.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Have the bits been bought?? If not what is the list of parts?? TBH,I have not updated the guide for a few months,so hopefully I will get a new one up for February.

[scaryjim]

... was going to be a based on the AMD 460 tri-core. ... now going to use a Llano A6 3500 as on the face of it it is very similar in performance

Erm, you are aware that the Athlon II X3 460 is 3.4GHz, and the A6-3500 is only 2.1GHz? The A6 will be quite a lot slower in CPU intensive tasks. Admittedly for the uses you outline you probably won't notice *much* difference, but you could find browsing flash-heavy or javascript-heavy websites drags a bit on the A6, and if you do expand your uses for the machine with time the A6 will struggle long before the Athlon would.

Not that I'm suggesting the A6 is a bad idea mind you, it's a decent all round APU, but I just wanted to check that you were aware that the disparity in clock speeds will have a significant impact on performance!

[Attila the Bun]

the A6 3500 you know
4gb 1600 Corsair XMS
MSI A75MA-P35 mb - fairly basic but has USB 3 and SATA 6
750gb WD HDD
Samsung DVD +- RW
Antec 520 Neo Modular PSU

Won't be the quickest but will be a lot better than what they have and will cost less than the base unit they previously bought.

[Attila the Bun]

Erm, you are aware that the Athlon II X3 460 is 3.4GHz, and the A6-3500 is only 2.1GHz? The A6 will be quite a lot slower in CPU intensive tasks. Admittedly for the uses you outline you probably won't notice *much* difference, but you could find browsing flash-heavy or javascript-heavy websites drags a bit on the A6, and if you do expand your uses for the machine with time the A6 will struggle long before the Athlon would.

Not that I'm suggesting the A6 is a bad idea mind you, it's a decent all round APU, but I just wanted to check that you were aware that the disparity in clock speeds will have a significant impact on performance!

Jim,
The reasons for the choices are thus:
1) The current pc is nearly 7 years old and was a refurbished dell...the postal system is quicker so any drag will not be noticed
2) The athlons were either sold out or too expensive for the budget.
3) Investigations suggest that the A6 will overclock to a least decent laptop level without the need for excessive cooling.
4) The uses for the machine will remain constant. No games (except the windows stuff), just photos, films and music.

5) I am paying for it

I'm not solid on this configuration so if you can suggest a better mix I'm all ears.

[scaryjim]

I'm not solid on this configuration so if you can suggest a better mix I'm all ears.

Hmmm, I'll have a think on. I don't think there's anything wrong with the A6-3500, but the clock speed's quite low and based on previous reviews / improvements my guess is it's roughly equivalent to a 2.4GHz Athlon II X3, which would be roughly equivalent to a (theoretical ) Athlon 64 X3 @ 2.7GHz - decent, but not earth shattering.

Total budget is £250 for a base unit no OS, right? And main uses are web browsing, word processing ... no real problem ... media - is that DVDs, MP3s, HD video, streaming audio, streaming video (iplayer?), or a mix of all of the above?

[Attila the Bun]

Total budget is £250 for a base unit no OS, right? And main uses are web browsing, word processing ... no real problem ... media - is that DVDs, MP3s, HD video, streaming audio, streaming video (iplayer?), or a mix of all of the above?

Thanks Jim, sorry I didn't reply yesterday but I got started on some building work and forgot about this thread until this morning.

I think a mix of all of the above but with most emphasis on browsing/word processing and less, possible no emphasis on streaming as iplayer is already on the cable package.

Do you or anyone else know SCANs return policy, is it return of unwanted goods within 7 days of purchase?

[scaryjim]

Assuming you don't need bluray playback, an Athlon II X2 and 880G motherboard would be more than enough - I currently have a single core Sempron 140 + 785G motherboard as the family's shared computer which basically does word processing, web browsing and DVD / iplayer playback and that's more than sufficient.

Alternatively, you could go for one of the A4 Llanos (they're a higher clocked dual core) instead - it would be more than sufficient for your purposes and give you a better IGP than the Athlon + 880G.

Either of those options would save you that bit of money (compared to the A6-3500) to invest in other areas of the build, and should be as good, if not better, for the usages you've outlined - in particular (in my experience, at least) flash-heavy websites will like the faster clock speeds rather than the extra cores.


Hope that's in time to be of help - been moving house this week and everything's been manic (not to mention I have no real internet access at the minute!).

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It seems the A6-3500 is only around £6 more than an A4-3400 and has twice the L2 cache per core. OTH,it has a lower base clockspeed of around 2.1GHZ but has Turbo Core upto 2.4GHZ,although I still suspect the A4-3400 might still have faster cores.

[scaryjim]

the A4-3300 is £46 (@ ebuyer) and is a 2.5GHz dual core with 160 shader IGP @ 444MHz. The A4-3400 is £51 and is a 2.7GHz dual core with 160 shader IGP @ 600MHz. The A6-3500 is £57 and is a 2.1GHz triple core (turbo to 2.4GHz) with 320 shader IGP @ 444MHz. All three have UVD3 for media decoding duties. As CAT says, the A6-3500 has 1M of L2 cache per core, rather than the 512K of the A4s.

Having looked at current availability and price of Athlon II processors and 880G motherboards I've changed my mind about that option - I don't think it's going to gain you anything or cost you significantly less. The other possibility would be an SNB-based Pentium build which would also be more than powerful enough for your requirements, but it sounds like you're quite keen to go AMD fusion, so at that point it's the old old choice between clock speed and cores!

My personal opinion is that your workload won't use the extra shaders and core of the A6, and will use the extra clock speed of the A4-3400. If I was doing a build for the stated purposes, I'd go for the faster dual core. But that is just an opinion, and either processor should be fine for the planned usage.

[Attila the Bun]

Ta for all the advice guys.

I'll go with the 3500 I think as I won't have the return post costs. I honestly don't think that they will notice any difference at all. But they will notice a big difference from their old machine.

[Attila the Bun]

Update for Jim and Cat.

Nice build that runs really nicely...cleared out all the crap from the old rig before transfer so the start button to desktop (without password) was about 25/30 seconds.

The only thing that annoys is the case...It looks ok but the wiring was a bit botched for the On/Off and HDD LEDs.

[andy572]

Did you look further into unlocking? It's not something that I'd consider doing for those tasks and I know and have witnessed that feeling of a new system after such a long time for an extra core not to matter. I built a new system for myself a couple of years ago and moving from a single-core Athlon, it didn't matter that I didn't have the 'latest and greatest'. At stock, it felt snappy and did everything. As it still does! Building for other people, reliability would be my main consideration and I'd avoid tweaking for extra performance when it's only for simple tasks.

That boot time suggests it's a nice system. Is it of the spec you listed earlier (4GB, 750GB drive etc.)? Have you tried it with Flash video at sites like YouTube or played, say, HD or post-processed video?

[Bambooz]

This might be interesting if you're into this stuff..

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=158819