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For our tests, we used a Coolit ECO A.L.C. to cool the AMD Vision A8-3850 APU and used an Antec TruePower 550W power supply for the system. According to AMD, the Lynx platform can experience instability with some larger power supplies (750W+) due to the lower idle power so it is worth bearing this in mind when you're building a Lynx system.
Special thanks to Intel for supplying some hardware at late notice.
AMD Vision A8-3850 System
APU: AMD Vision A8-3850 2.9 GHz
Memory: 4 GB (2x 2GB) Kingston HyperX DD3 (1866 MHz)
Power Supply: Antec TruePower 550W
Motherboard: Asus F1A75-M Pro
Cooler: Coolit ECO A.L.C.
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Drive: Kingston SSDNow V100 128 GB
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Graphics (APU Only): AMD Radeon HD 6550D (512 MB Allocated)
Graphics (Dual Graphics Mode): AMD Radeon HD 6690D2 (6550D + AMD Radeon 6670) – tests in this mode are listed ‘DG'
Intel Core-i3 2105 System
CPU: Intel Core i3-2105 3.10 GHz
Memory: 4 GB (2x 2GB) Kingston HyperX DD3 (1333 MHz)
Power Supply: Antec TruePower 550W
Motherboard: Asus P8H67-M Pro
Cooler: Thermaltake Contac29 BP
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Drive: Kingston SSDNow V100 128 GB
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Graphics: Intel HD3000
Other Hardware
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240 GB SSD
Patriot Torqx 2 in Akasa Elite S USB3.0 enclosure
Viewsonic VX2260WM 1920 x 1080 Monitor
Software:
SiSoft Sandra 2011 SP3
Cinebench R11.5
Super Pi Mod 1.5
3DMark 11
3DMark Vantage
PCMark 7
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink PowerDVD 11
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6
DiRT 3
F1 2010
Dead Space 2
Call of Duty: Black Ops
Seems brilliant for a high end media center. wouldnt even need a discrete card in most cases.
Interesting idea to watercool it…….. wonder how far the hardcore overclockers will get it.
A low end video card would work wonders in that system the way it can be combined. would have liked to see a few more discrete cards in the line up for curiousity.
I think that Asus board will sell very well, depending on the price. seems pretty loaded if they can get it out around the £100 pp.
ATI are really saving AMd lately. GPU power FTW.
quad core really does help. are there plans for a 6 core version at some stage? with their power saving techniques, it could be really efficient at idle then have some serious power when needed.
Power consumption is great. I think you might actually be able to get away without a discrete card with this, for a while anyway. If you wanted to game at 1080p and maybe only drop some settings.
Direct X 11 titles might prove too much, but its a hell of an improvement. hopefully we start seeing these in laptops. and battery life should still be good.
People also underestimate the importance of the GPU, which is growing significantly more key as the operating systems develop. the GPU will at some stage handle a huge portion of windows rendering tasks. AMD are miles ahead of intel in this regard, thanks to buying ATI. Intel need to buy nvidia. what do they do instead? buy mcafee.
madness.
I’ve already added this one to my ever growing wishlist. Lovely review, btw.
Need the whole system price to really be sure, but looking good so far
@Lee: Couldn’t agree more, low price on one component is not enough.
I recently built my sister a Llano based system, it was the A6-3650 version though, Gigabyte motherboard, 4gb Ram a 500gb HD, DVD writer, 19inch flat panel monitor a case with 450w PSU and keyboard/ mouse…£320 including delivery from Aria.
Installed Black Ops on it, and it played OK, at 1366 * 768 resolution with no AA. Would maybe need to knock off one or two other settings to get it playing perfectly. Windows scored the system a 4.5, but oddly that was down to Windows own 2d performance, everything else was around 5.9 (HD) up to 6.4 (3d gfx) (processor got a 6.1
All in all for the price I was impressed with it. For a do a bit of this and a bit of that computer, which wouldn’t really be used for 3D and video editing these systemsa re great. (without monitor / keyboard / mouse it was only about £230!)