AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[Terbinator]

FM1 though :/

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

A4 5300 is FM2!

[Noxvayl]

I had a look at prices on Scan and thought it was awesome that I could get a FM2 motherboard, A4 5300 and 4Gb DDR3 1600Mhz RAM for under £100. I am looking forward to upgrading family computers in the future.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I was reading the Toms Hardware review of the latest uber fast Core i7 six core CPU and notice the FX8350 results in lightly threaded games:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/core-i...-32564-12.html

The OS used was Windows 7 and the graphics card used was a GTX680 2GB.





The FX8350 has a decent performance lead over the Phenom II X4 980BE and the Phenom II X6 1100T. Since th FX8350 has a maximum Turbo Core speed of around 4.2GHZ and a basic clockspeed of around 4GHZ,clock for clock it does not appear slower in the two games than a Phenom II X4!!

It does make me think that an FX6300,maybe even with a mild overclock pushing the base clockspeed up to 4GHZ from 3.5GHZ,might be not far off Core i5 level speed in WoW,and certainly faster than a Core i3 I suspect.

[DanceswithUnix]

S/A proving again that Trinity is targeted as a laptop product:

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/12/l...amds-a10-apus/

[KeyboardDemon]

I had a look at prices on Scan and thought it was awesome that I could get a FM2 motherboard, A4 5300 and 4Gb DDR3 1600Mhz RAM for under £100. I am looking forward to upgrading family computers in the future.

Nice, I didn't know that, it's worth keeping that in mind for when the time comes.

[scaryjim]

S/A proving again that Trinity is targeted as a laptop product:

A little harsh on the A10-5700 Whilst the 5800K may be the flagship product, the 5700 is the better chip by some distance - it performs almost as well, and its TDP is less than twice the 4600M's. Increasing TDPs have always had decreasing returns: what AMD have done is create a great mainstream chip for laptops and system integrator boxes, targeting the 35W and 65W TDPs as the key points to perform well at.

I'm intrigued that such a large drop in GPU clock doesn't hit gaming performance harder though - there's obviously some other factor (possibly the DDR3-1600 memory?) limiting performance.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

TBH,I am more suprised by the WoW performance of the FX8350.

If you look at the previous WoW benchmark they used,the Intel CPUs seem much faster:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...k,3181-22.html



However,the latest WoW expansion is meant to be much more CPU intensive too - I wonder if there have been some optimisations which helped the newer AMD CPUs too?? Both the SB and IB Core i5 CPUs and the Phenom II X6 CPUs seem to have reduced performance,whereas the FX series has improved.



In both reviews a GTX680 was used.

[Biscuit]

Does wow have a generic benchmark tool or do they have to get the results themselves?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AFAIK,you need to do your own benchmarking. An overclocked FX4300 or FX6300 might actually do relatively well??

[Biscuit]

If they dont have a dedicated benchmark tool then perhaps they have checked a different part of the game from the last test, where there is different things going on stressing different components in different ways, hence why some CPUs perform worse in the new benchmarks... just a thought.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

If they dont have a dedicated benchmark tool then perhaps they have checked a different part of the game from the last test, where there is different things going on stressing different components in different ways, hence why some CPUs perform worse in the new benchmarks... just a thought.

Probably not as they used Pandaria here and the other test is Cataclysm. If you look at the Core i5 results and the Phenom II X6 results they are consistent within themselves,which seems right as WoW only really stresses two cores.

Edit!!

Here is the first review where they used Pandaria.



That is the FX8350 review.

Second Edit!!

This article look at core scaling using a Phenom II X6:

http://technewspedia.com/we-analyze-...s-of-pandaria/

It seems Pandaria still uses two cores.

[DanceswithUnix]

AFAIK,you need to do your own benchmarking. An overclocked FX4300 or FX6300 might actually do relatively well??

Yes it does:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6396/t...x4300-tested/5

Look at the X6/X4 at the bottom of the Pandaria graph you posted. Big difference in clock speed and cores, almost identical performance.
The i3 usually does rather nicely in WoW as well : http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/699?vs=289

This must be something like cache/memory performance suiting the game engine.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The Phenom II X6 1100T runs at 3.7GHZ across three cores during lightly threaded scenarios,and has a better memory controller than the Phenom II X4 980BE which also runs at 3.7GHZ,although it the latter have more L3 cache per core.

I suspect that the Anandtech bench results are for Cataclysm not for Pandaria,so this is why the Toms Hardware results are interesting.

[DanceswithUnix]

The Phenom II X6 1100T runs at 3.7GHZ across three cores during lightly threaded scenarios,and has a better memory controller than the Phenom II X4 980BE which also runs at 3.7GHZ,although it the latter have more L3 cache per core.

I suspect that the Anandtech bench results are for Cataclysm not for Pandaria,so this is why the Toms Hardware results are interesting.

Having a look at those figures, the i7-3770K is the same result as when that cpu was released.

By the time the FX-8350 was released, even though Pandaria wasn't out at the time that review was written the preparation patch was deployed so the world was already on that codebase.

So either Anandtech run a private server and the values are out of date, or they are a mix of 4.x and 5.x clients. Either way the graphs would be junk. Pah.

[scaryjim]

Given the official announcement of K20 today, couldn't resist going back to what I said a few pages ago...

Odd that they've shipped K20s to ORNL, a high profile HPC customer, but still haven't official announced the specs of it ... makes you wonder if ORNL have got cherry picked dies that can run more SMX than the "standard" K20s...

And now we have the answer - ORNL are using K20X cards, which are ... yup, cherry-picked GK110s with one more SMX available than standard Remember folks, you heard it here first