My A6-3670K mini-review

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

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.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

GPU benchmarks


Diablo III

With over 6 millions sales in a few months,Diablo III is one of the most popular games to be released this year.

The game was run at 1440X900 at High settings with shadows and clutter switched off. Using FRAPS,a three minute run was done through two areas in Act I. The first was through the Old Ruins and the fields surrounding it . The second was the Cemetary of the Forsaken which has numerous crypts. Both areas have a decent number of spawned enemies.

In both cases the game was playable with minimum framerates above 30FPS.


Hard Reset

Next up is Hard Rest,a game which embraces the gameplay style of the old school of FPS games like Doom. The game is DX9 and was run at 1440X900 with high quality textures,AF switched off,low shadows,high post processing,high particles,default physics and high debris.

The first graph is from the internal benchmark which is included with the game.

A FRAPS measurement of a playthough through the first level until the last boss was also performed.

Although though there were some dips under 25FPS,the game seemed relatively playable still.


Civilization V

Civilization V is one of the most popular RTS games ATM with over 9 million sales. The game has various benchmark modes and among them is the late game benchmarks which simulates the game after 300 turns. A FRAPS measurement of the first 60 seconds was made. The game was run at 1440X900 under DX11 with leader scene quality set to low,low overlay detail,shadow quality switched off,minimum fog of war quality,medium terrain detail,low terrain tessellation quality,terrain shader quality switched off and low water quality and high texture quality. High detail strategic view was enabled. AMD driver controlled tessellation was kept activated.

Framerates hovered about the 30FPS to 35FPS mark. Zooming into parts of the map did reduce framerates though and was slightly jittery. However,the game should be reasonable playable overall.


DiRT 2

The final game tested was DiRT 2,which is a racing game. Using the Adrenaline Racing Benchmark tool,different stages of the game were benchmarked using FRAPS. The game was run at 1440X900 using medium quality settings under DX11 with no AA and 8 cars. AMD driver controlled tessellation was kept activated.

The first track tested was Battersea which is a stadium track which runs at nighttime.

The second track tested was Utah which is daytime desert track.

The third track tested was China which is daytime track with a combination of grassland and forest.

The game seemed quite playable on all tracks with adequate minimum framerates.

 

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General usage impressions so far...!

At least in the few weeks I have used the system,it has been quite nippy indeed. Running firefox with loads of tabs open,image editing software and watching videos were handled fine by the A6-3670K. Considering that this CPU is under £70 ,it seems rather good value for money considering I can play some games at reasonable settings too.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I have an I3 2130 alongside a 570GTX that plays games at max settings including bf3 on my 24inch benQ at 1920 lol.

I got it for £75 pounds you think the amd equiv could do that? honest q.

I got my Core i3 2100 for around £80 delivered soon after launch last year - the A6 3670K is available for much less than £70 and you get £10 cashback from AMD too.

Like I said the Core i3 2100 is better for gaming with a discrete card,but as you can see the A6 is not always slower for everything either and if you are using the IGP,it is no contest.

Have you tried overclocking yet? I've messed with an e2-3000m hp laptop using k10stat and the chip really didn't scale well.

But I haven't used a LLano desktop setup. So wondered what v-core is required for over 3ghz

Not tried overclocking as the motherboard supplied is probaby not the best for overclocking, and I need to find the only heatsink I have which is AMD compatible!! Everything else I have is for Intel CPUs.

Around 3.3GHZ seems to be the average overclock for the A6-3670K on HWBOT:

http://hwbot.org/hardware/processor/a6_3670k/

Llano's rather impressive isn't it?

Yep! I was really suprised I could run games like DiRT2 at decent settings,and for a general purpose system it really seems a nice package.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I gave my A8-3800 and that Gigabyte board I reviewed here to my Brother to replace his E7300 and 4850, he was impressed also with the onboard IGP of it.

That is also the 65W TDP A8 too isn't it? Nice videos in the review!

I really hope the 65W A10-5700 is more easily available,as I would really like to plonk one in the ISK110 mini-ITX case.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18433537

Posted some benches etc in here. The launch seems a bit of a shambles tbh, no drivers on AMDs site for this chip/chipset combo yet... The 12.8 betas really let this machine fly in games though, can't wait for some proper releases.

Eidt: Some of the reviews seem a bit suspect based on my experience with this laptop

Cool - have not seen many user reviews of the A10 yet!! Some laptops only have single channel RAM which could explain the lower performance.

I can find reviews on the mobile chips, but nothing on release or anything.
Name of laptop?

Why would AMD not big up their one product that crushes the competition (Their APU's)

NO COMPETITORS! sell Trinity based laptops.

 

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Were you using the on board GPU's? Im assuming you were. Im somewhat surprised by these new APU's and the possibilities they open up for really cheap but strong gaming builds, nothing enthusiast level in my opinion but entering the high end spectrum of gaming.

Yes.

Can you run some benchmarks with Dual Graphics on and off? I have some bechmarks from my Llano laptop with it on/off somewhere but I want to see how well it performs on the desktop side.

The benchmarks were done only with the IGP enabled. I don't have an HD6570 or HD6670 so cannot test Hybrid Crossfire.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

My review is on the Hexus frontpage:

http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/44425-amd-apu-what-consumers-think/