Caporegime
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I won one of these over on Hexus,so I thought would post some of the benchmarks I performed on the CPU over here,for anyone who is interested.
Unboxing pictures
Some pictures of the packaging indicating that this is a Black Edition CPU with a unlocked multiplier(yay!).
The additional bumpf indicates you can Crossfire the IGP for some more gaming goodness(double yay!).
The seal.
None shall pass - apart from me!!
Opening up the box - we are greeted with the included bits.
Basically,one CPU,one cooler,one printed warranty sheet and an AMD case sticker. AMD gives you a three year warranty BTW.
A closer look at the cooler. It looks rather square.
The cooler is 5CM in height.
A few benchmarks and general usage impressions.
Here I will be running a few CPU and GPU performance benchmarks on the A6-3670K. These will be compared to the Core i3 2100 I have currently,although the Core i3 2100 is more in line with the A8-3850 and A8-3870K with regards to price. So note this please!!
For gaming with a discrete card,a Core i3 2100 would be better overall.
The test systems are as follows:
1.)AMD - A6 3670K,ASUS F1A55-M,4GB 1600MHZ DDR3,Kingston HyperX 120GB,Windows 7 Enterprise
2.)Intel - Core i3 2100,Gigabyte GA-H67N-USB3-B3,8GB 1600MHZ DDR3,OCZ Vertex 60GB,Windows 7 Enterprise
OK,the systems are not equal in many ways,but I thought it would still worth comparing them.
CPU benchmarks
Maxon CineBench 11.5
Although,rendering is not an typical use of a sub £100 CPU,CB 11.5 does tend to be a good test of floating point power in a CPU.
We can see here that the A6-3670K ekes out a victory here.
x264 benchmark
Now moving over to a more realworld usage scenario which tests video encoding,the A6 3670K loses in the first pass of the encode,but is victorious in the second pass,which is over 70% of the time where the encoding is present.
HandBrake 0.9.5.
HandBrake is one of the most common video encoding applications and is a good test for multi-threaded processing ability.
The conditions are outlined in this thread:
http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware...ts-who-has-greatest-multi-threaded-power.html
The A6 3670K is overall faster than a Core i3 2100.
7-zip compression/decompression benchmark
7-zip is a widely used file compression and decompression utility and has a handy built-in benchmark.
The A6-3670K is faster in this benchmark.
iTunes 10.6.3.25
Looking at reviews the Core i3 2100 should be ahead,however, the typical usage scenario of ripping a CD is to use a USB or SATA optical drive and do encoding on the fly. Most reviews are probably using WAV rips on the hard disk I suspect.
An external DVD drive was used in this case. Error correction was enabled and rips were done to 320KBPS AAC encoded files.
Interestingly,both the times are the same. Hence,it can be concluded that the optical drive is probably the bottleneck in most cases. At some point I will try an internal SATA optical drive to see if there is a difference.
GPU assisted CPU benchmarks
Luxmark v2.0
Luxmark is a rendering benchmark which can use GPU acceleration via OpenCL. The Intel HD2000 IGP in the Core i3 2100 does not support OpenCL ATM.
Enabling OpenCL acceleration pushes up the score by over 30% compared to the CPU only score. If this sort of improvement can be seen with everyday applications,it will be very useful indeed.
Unboxing pictures
Some pictures of the packaging indicating that this is a Black Edition CPU with a unlocked multiplier(yay!).
The additional bumpf indicates you can Crossfire the IGP for some more gaming goodness(double yay!).
The seal.
None shall pass - apart from me!!
Opening up the box - we are greeted with the included bits.
Basically,one CPU,one cooler,one printed warranty sheet and an AMD case sticker. AMD gives you a three year warranty BTW.
A closer look at the cooler. It looks rather square.
The cooler is 5CM in height.
A few benchmarks and general usage impressions.
Here I will be running a few CPU and GPU performance benchmarks on the A6-3670K. These will be compared to the Core i3 2100 I have currently,although the Core i3 2100 is more in line with the A8-3850 and A8-3870K with regards to price. So note this please!!
For gaming with a discrete card,a Core i3 2100 would be better overall.
The test systems are as follows:
1.)AMD - A6 3670K,ASUS F1A55-M,4GB 1600MHZ DDR3,Kingston HyperX 120GB,Windows 7 Enterprise
2.)Intel - Core i3 2100,Gigabyte GA-H67N-USB3-B3,8GB 1600MHZ DDR3,OCZ Vertex 60GB,Windows 7 Enterprise
OK,the systems are not equal in many ways,but I thought it would still worth comparing them.
CPU benchmarks
Maxon CineBench 11.5
Although,rendering is not an typical use of a sub £100 CPU,CB 11.5 does tend to be a good test of floating point power in a CPU.
We can see here that the A6-3670K ekes out a victory here.
x264 benchmark
Now moving over to a more realworld usage scenario which tests video encoding,the A6 3670K loses in the first pass of the encode,but is victorious in the second pass,which is over 70% of the time where the encoding is present.
HandBrake 0.9.5.
HandBrake is one of the most common video encoding applications and is a good test for multi-threaded processing ability.
The conditions are outlined in this thread:
http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware...ts-who-has-greatest-multi-threaded-power.html
The A6 3670K is overall faster than a Core i3 2100.
7-zip compression/decompression benchmark
7-zip is a widely used file compression and decompression utility and has a handy built-in benchmark.
The A6-3670K is faster in this benchmark.
iTunes 10.6.3.25
Looking at reviews the Core i3 2100 should be ahead,however, the typical usage scenario of ripping a CD is to use a USB or SATA optical drive and do encoding on the fly. Most reviews are probably using WAV rips on the hard disk I suspect.
An external DVD drive was used in this case. Error correction was enabled and rips were done to 320KBPS AAC encoded files.
Interestingly,both the times are the same. Hence,it can be concluded that the optical drive is probably the bottleneck in most cases. At some point I will try an internal SATA optical drive to see if there is a difference.
GPU assisted CPU benchmarks
Luxmark v2.0
Luxmark is a rendering benchmark which can use GPU acceleration via OpenCL. The Intel HD2000 IGP in the Core i3 2100 does not support OpenCL ATM.
Enabling OpenCL acceleration pushes up the score by over 30% compared to the CPU only score. If this sort of improvement can be seen with everyday applications,it will be very useful indeed.
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I's say it's about £50-70 too expensive in the UK mind, compared to what they are in North America and Canada, even including VAT