AMD Richland APU vs Haswell Performance Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
709 words · ~3 min read
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Adata XPG V2 memory kits are optimized for the latest Intel gaming platforms.
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Check the link in the video description for more details. Welcome to my
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performance overview, I guess you could call it a review of sorts, of AMD's
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Richland series of APUs. Now, we only got one of them. We got the
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A106800 K. And so we kind of went, okay,
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so this is going to be priced at around 145 bucks or so, uh, sort of in bulk
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pricing. So let's compare that against the obvious competition, which is, of
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course, a sea turtle. Well, no, but it felt that way a
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little bit because AMD's Richland is really in a class of its own when it
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comes to a lowcost value gaming
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platform. So AMD sort of released this Richland
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series of APUs. They're on the same FM2 socket as the older APUs. So you don't
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have to really upgrade your hardware. You can just get um a BIOS update for
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your board or whatever else and you can basically drop in a Richland. Also AMD
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has told me that we are going to be looking at FM2 for the next generation
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of APUs as well. So they haven't really changed the platform. In fact, they
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haven't really changed the architecture at all. So, it's mostly just a small
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speed bump over the last generation 5000
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series, like the 5800K APU. So, why did
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they do this? My guess is it probably has something to do with the release of
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Haswell. So, we took the lowest cost Haswell we could find and took a few
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mainstream games that you might want to play on a system that doesn't have a
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dedicated graphics card and we ran them head-to-head. Now, with that in mind, we
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didn't do any compute performance benchmarking because we already know the
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Intel chip is going to wipe the floor with the AMD one. We're talking about a
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very specific usage case here that is not focused on CPU. So, if you want
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better CPU performance, go with a Haswell. If you want better GPU
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performance, well, stay tuned because in
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Skyrim, our 4430, which is an i5 4430,
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Intel doesn't have an i3 yet. They're launching only the higher end of their
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Haswell CPUs, got beat by our 58 or
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rather 6800 K by a whopping 10 frames
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per second, 24 frames per second average on Richland versus 15. Now, with that
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said, the 5800K, the last gen one, was only one FPS behind this one. So, you
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can really see it's a small clock bump and not really anything revolutionary in
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terms of performance. Our next game up was Dirt 3. And in this one, Richland
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outperformed Intel Solution by about
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75%. That is fantastic. All the way from
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22 FPS or so to 37 FPS going for a
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different platform. Bearing in mind this one costs about $30 less than the Intel
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solution. Finally, in Starcraft 2, which is a very sort of mainstreamy type
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title, Richland wins by about 25% versus
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the Haswell GPU, and we see it once again very close to the 5800K. So, was
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this the most exhaustive test of benchmarks that we could have possibly
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run? No. Was this pretty much all you need to know about Richland? I would say
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yes. AMD's delivered a new chip that
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goes on their existing platform that you don't need a new board for. They've
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delivered outstanding graphics performance in a CPU or APU or whatever
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the heck you want to call it, which really isn't any different from what
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they did last time, but that fine because what they did last time was
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great, too. I've done a fair number of videos about their last generation APU
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and it's awesome. And so, I think that pretty much wraps it up. If you want to
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do entry-level gaming and you don't want to buy a graphics card, buy an APU.
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Thanks for checking out this episode of Linus Tech Tips. Don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews,
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and other computer videos.