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.
I pulled my Phenom II 965BE out for a few days to test an APU, the A8 3870K, overclocked to 3.6GHz, using a Thor Hammer CPU Cooler, may have gotten it higher but 3.6GHz was great, really showed the performance increase. With mine though i used a HD6970 so all the bottlenecking was in the CPU, compared to the Phenom 965BE i noticed some games were laggier, or had loading stutters, one been Fallout 3 and New Vegas, Skyrim was also not great, it was pushed to the full settings including AA x 8 to really strain the card, i have a few videos of me running my Phenom II with Skyrim and recording wit ENB shaders, 2k textures a lot of other mods and getting 60fps clean, tried it with this CPU at it was struggling to get past 45fps with loading stutters.
Some games performed quite a bit better, mainly down to the higher clock speeds.
- Just Cause 2 - Desert Sunrise - Vysnc off - x8 AA - Ultra
Frames: 8564
Time: 118530ms
Avg: 72.252
Min: 50
Max: 526
and in Max Payne 3
2012-08-15 14:20:58 - MaxPayne3 - Vysnc Disabled - Chapter: Hangover sent from Mother nature
Frames: 13048
Time: 140386ms
Avg: 92.944
Min: 66
Max: 135
So with a HD6970, certain games that albeit may not be that CPU heavy perform amazingly. That just what i wanted to add, oh and it ran pretty hot as at 3.7GHz it would hit it max Tj of 70c and crash. Around 3.6GHz at full load i got it to 65c. So overclocked to 3.6GHz it performs in areas worse than the Phenom II 965BE and in areas better, video rendering was about 2 mins faster for example. Anyway get one of these and crossfire it with a 6670 and you have a pretty capable system.
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