AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[scaryjim]

tbh My experience with Picos (or rather, an FSP equivalent that came with its power brick) was very frustrating - despite being rated to 90W, and my system drawing less than 80 at full chat, and OCP kicked in immediately when I turned the system on. When I dug a bit deeper, it turned out the 12v line was only rated to 5A, which meant it was nearer a 60W PSU.

For full desktop systems I'm not sure I'd bother when ~ 200W 1U and TFX PSUs are available, but for an AM1 system with a peak draw in the twenties, it'd be well worth a cheap Pico and a 60W 12v brick.

[Agent]

Like I said the power bricks are expensive once you start going much above 100W and want something half decent,unless you are willing to find that old Dell 200W jobbie and modify it....

Yeah, I wasn't disagreeing, just stating my experiences with the picos. I fully agree the power brick is very important .

[Agent]

tbh My experience with Picos (or rather, and FSP branded version) was very frustrating - despite being rated to 90W, and my system drawing less than 80 at full chat, and OCP kicked in immediately when I turned the system on. When I dug a bit deeper, it turned out the 12v line was only rated to 5A, which meant it was nearer a 60W PSU.

For full desktop systems I'm not sure I'd bother when ~ 200W 1U and TFX PSUs are available, but for an AM1 system with a peak draw in the twenties, it'd be well worth a cheap Pico and a 60W 12v brick.

That's largely my experiences to. I design my low wattage systems to be just that, so can get away with most Pico / PSU combos. Anything that needs a bit of grunt just gets the normal PSU treatment, as it's simply not worth the hassle.

As soon as the NUC starts dropping a bit more though, there is little point in me even bothering. Intel have exactly the right idea with it, and a bunch of us was telling the AMD guy who posted here last time such.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

There are reasonable number of picoPSU powered APU builds out there on forums,and ECS has even released a DC-DC thin-ITX FM2+ motherboard too:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ecs...itx,26403.html

Edit!!

HP is releasing this Kaveri based nettop too:

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/ads/elite-a...-705-mini.html





I do wish more Kaveri based nettops would be released TBH.

[watercooled]

Something slightly concerning about that clone is the 12v rating claimed on the ebay page: Beavy load [sic]: 3A. So I'm not sure how they get 160W from. Yeah it's only going to be passing straight through a FET, but if they've seriously under-spec'd it, it could be a problem.

@scaryjim: I have one of those 90W FSP PSUs myself and found pretty much the same; it gets *really* hot under even fairly light load. The 19-12v conversion seems like a poor choice IMO, while 19v power bricks tend to be cheaper, the conversion just lowers efficiency and makes the DC-DC's job harder than it needs to be. I mean it works provided you keep the load at more like 60W, but the 12v pass-through designs seem like a better choice unless you need it to cope with voltage fluctuations e.g. battery power.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

New Kaveri models launched:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8149/a...top-processors

The A10-7800 looks very interesting.

[scaryjim]

New Kaveri models launched:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8149/a...top-processors

The A10-7800 looks very interesting.

I'd be interested if the A8-7600 had ever made it to market. Too little too late really. Sure, a 45W A10 with full complement of shaders is a nice idea, but it should've been released at the same time as the 7850k and the 7700. Either that or they shouldn't have released the other chips early: they've lost all the review buzz and they're going to have to go about generating all that feedback again. These need to be reviewed and appear in the channel very quickly if they're going to make any impact at all.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AMD internal reshuffling:

http://www.zdnet.com/amd-shuffles-ex...ul-7000030481/

EU upholds Intel fine from 2009:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...w/36449076.cms

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Toms Hardware test the G3258 against the X4 750K both overclocked:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/pentiu...w-32974-6.html

Interestingly,in many games the Haswell Core i3 has better frame latencies and I am surprised at how the Athlon X4 750K performs TBH.

I will post the charts.

ARMA 3





BF4 single player





GRID2





Metro:Last Light

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thief





Tombraider





WoW

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Is it me,or does TH not actually look at their results again??

Although the Pentium gets kicked around in a few of our benchmarks, it does beat the Athlon in every game we test—sometimes by a lot.

Emm,nope??

They even say the Pentium dual core stutters in Thief and the Athlon II X4 does not.

[kalniel]

Is it me,or does TH not actually look at their results again??

They don't seem to. Take the results, check testing conditions, then ignore their analysis.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

They don't seem to. Take the results, check testing conditions, then ignore their analysis.

They are not the only one too - even TR does it too. They tested the FX6350 and IB Core i3 3220,and the FX6350 ended up being faster overall. Then for the next few build guides,they ignored the FX6300 series and just recommended the Core i3 instead.

It does make it sound like the recommendations are pre-judged before the reviews are written which is VERY worrying indeed.

[watercooled]

Looking at the frame time graphs, the Athlon looks generally more stable, where the Pentium seems more erratic overall, with some very pronounced spikes above the rest. For example look at Thief - 250-300ms??!! That's basically the game locking up for a moment! Any idea what the sample size is for those time graphs?

Also, BF4 SP, it looks like the CPU is struggling a bit - I wonder how it could cope in MP, which is notoriously harder on the CPU and favours more threads?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Looking at the frame time graphs, the Athlon looks generally more stable, where the Pentium seems more erratic overall, with some very pronounced spikes above the rest. For example look at Thief - 250-300ms??!! That's basically the game locking up for a moment! Any idea what the sample size is for those time graphs?

Also, BF4 SP, it looks like the CPU is struggling a bit - I wonder how it could cope in MP, which is notoriously harder on the CPU and favours more threads?

Posted it on OcUK too,and the usual suspects ignore the weakness of the Pentium. The POWAR of branding strikes again.

Edit!!

I really riled up some of them.

OMFG,they are going for the insults and Straw Mans now.

[Terbinator]

The fact you need (?) a Zxx board to overclock the Pentium dampens its appeal above all for me.