Gadgetory

alright I'll review the a 1290 800 let's do it first though how'd I let you guys down gently hmm okay well first here's some quick background information about the a12 900 and this new series of paper used from AMD for those of you who aren't yet up to speed AMD released Rison earlier this year which I'm sure you are aware of and it's been happy times for enthusiasts ever since budget shoppers recently received the quad-core Eisen 3 models but those who are in a truly tight budget they're still hanging out for those ap use which integrate both the CPU and GPU under the one roof this first wave of AMD APU is on the am 4 platform have been given the codename Bristol Ridge but they aren't what many believe them to be or at least hope they'll be in short these arts and based ap use and those probably won't arrive till sometime next year what we have here our excavator base CPU cores in other words I refined bulldozer architecture and I am using the word refined quite loosely here the a 12-9 100 for example sports for excavator cause along with a generically named 512 stream processor enabled radeon r7 GPU the bristol ridge series was released as om products late last year but have recently become available on the retail market and this has caused a good many of you to get very excited the a12 9800 now costs 110 dollars u.s. and promises pretty decent integrated graphics performance and the best part being that you can take advantage of it on the new am 4 motherboards such as those sporting a be 350 chipset there's also a much cheaper an equally popular version without the integrated GPU called the athlon x4 950 and at $60 u.s. people have already started snapping them up however the less impulsive buyers among you have been desperately asking me to check these in your am for parts out to see if they're any good so let's do exactly that right now ok so right off the bat let's get this out of the way for now the bristol ridge range only supports up to ddr4 2400 memory and right now there is simply no way to set the memory be any higher at least on the motherboards I tried memory performance was always a big issue for the bulldozer architecture and after numerous revisions it's still rather pathetic compared to the Intel competition here we see the G 4560 pushing more than twice the bandwidth of the a12 9800 also keep in mind this apu also has to feed an integrated GPU with a measly eleven point two gigabytes of balance it's pretty tragic stuff next up we have seen a bench r15 which is a good synthetic benchmark for gauging how powerful a cpu single and multi-threaded performance really is as you can see the dual core Pentium G 4560 has no trouble hose in the a12 900 in both the single and multi-threaded tests and it's clocked quite a bit lower as well yep this is all looking very familiar very bulldozer ish so far to me PC mark 10 throws a number of common productivity workloads at the system and here we can see the individual scores for the of writing and spreadsheets tests even these basic tasks present a real challenge for the quad-core apu don't even bother with content creation here the a12 1900 was outscored by the g 45 60 by a massive 64 percent margin dual cores rule and old excavator corbeil CPUs drool that's the saying isn't it moving on we tried out the Monte Carlo simulation workload and here the APU keeps us waiting for almost 16 seconds again 64 percent longer than the G 45 60 so you want to do some encoding on a budget well then get the horizon 3 1200 because it was a hundred and fifty percent faster for the same price you'll need a cheap GPU with the Rison three processor but that shouldn't be an issue for more than twice the CPU firepower the a12 900 also took 46 percent longer than the G 45 60 in the corona benchmark and 52 percent longer than the r3 1200 the blender results aren't actually that bad here the a12 900 did beat out the G 45 60 though it has to be said the G 45 60 does put on a very poor showing in this test the apu was still 46 percent slower than the horizon 3 1200 now we have the Premiere Pro CC results and if you're buying the a 12 900 for a cheap video editing rig well I hope you're only making minute long skits because our one minute and 36 video took roughly 13 minutes to render now for some game test using an extreme high and discrete graphics card before we run a few integrated GPU tests now before you lose your mind that we're using a $110 CP with a $1,000 GPU just take a breath and relax this just gives us an idea of what the CPU side of things can deliver when uncapped before we get to the budget stuff so with the brakes off the a12 900 was good for just 40 FPS in this real-time strategy title and was 18% sold in the G 4560 in this very CPU intensive game moreover it was 30% slower than the horizon 3 1200 things look much worse this time in battlefield 1 and these are important results to note even with the Pascal based Titan GPU what this means is regardless of the graphics card you use it's not possible for the a12 900 to average more than 50 fps and will often dip into the low 40s you guys often ask me how it's possible at consoles with their mini jaguar cores are so much slower than budget cpus like the pentium g 45 60 well this is your answer finally we have hitman and here's another tunnel that shows us that no matter what kind of GPU firepower you bring to the table the a12 900 isn't going to a laugh anywhere near 60 FPS on average now just finally before we get to the integrated GPU gaming stuff here we have the full power consumption figures for the fully configured systems that right there shows us just how much of a truly massive step forward AMD may with the Zen architecture here we see that the a12 900 it consumes almost as much power as the 6 core 12 thread Rison 5 1600 in the excel test and we're not even stressing the GPU here the figures look much the same in the Cinebench r15 multi-threaded benchmark as well the total system consumption was 121 percent higher than that of the pentium g 45 60 and we often saw quite a lot less performance alright so here's a test the a12 900 can win against the pentium g 4560 testing integrated graphics Intel's integrated HD graphics is still a complete joke for the most part especially on their more affordable CPUs the G 45 60 is basically ok for Windows applications but is just pretty much next to useless for any kind of serious three rendering tasks here at average is just 14 fps and overwatch while the a12 900 managers are much more respectable 43 fps that said using the lowest possible in-game quality settings at 1080p the quad-core apu didn't exactly deliver a smooth experience with regular dips below 30 fps installing the $70 GeForce GT 1030 improve Mahomet on both CPUs dramatically though the g45 60 did deliver a better overall experience and it was noticeably smoother the a 12-9 hundreds integrated GPU does quite well in rocket League and with the game using very little CPU power the APU does do quite well here the G 4560 using the Intel HD graphics are still a pile of snot though with the GeForce GT 1038 does do very well finally I decided to check out csgo and here the G 4560 actually did manage to average 48 FPS using the Intel HD graphics there overall the experience was still pretty horrible for novice players the 8-12 900 wasn't too bad though even with a discrete GPU we still hit the same 45 FPS 1% low the G 45 60 proved to be a beast with the GT 1030 installed and never dip below a hundred FPS right so at this point you can probably tell I'm not at all impressed with the a12 900 and really I strongly recommend you avoid purchasing any of the bristol ridge cpus i thought long and hard about this and i can't really think of one valid situation where these cpus make an ounce of sense now you wouldn't buy any of these CPUs merely as a placeholder so you can get a zen based apu or maybe a rise on 3 cpu down the track that makes about as much sense as buying a kb like ex cpu as a tie over for one of the six core 8 core or bigger sky like ex cpus and then of course there is the athlon x4 950 and that is very cheap at 60 dollars I'll admit but it really delivers the exact same performance as what we just saw out of this chip with a discrete GPU the G 45 60 on the other hand all that can be had for about $80 u.s. at the moment and it's really world's better in every single way compared to the Athlon chip basically in order to use the athlon x4 950 or the a12 900 you need to buy a new a m4 motherboard and we that's a new ddr4 memory say you do go with an ultra cheap a320 board for $50 eight gigabytes of ddr4 for $70 that means the a 12900 upgrade package will set you back two hundred and thirty dollars meanwhile the same memory and motherboard combo with a rise in three twelve hundred CPU plus the GeForce GT 1030 will cost you $300 so that's only a 30% increase in price for over twice the CPU power and twice the GPU power meanwhile if you're optically athlon x4 950 and the GT 1030 combo instead well that's even worse as the rise in three 1200 with the same discrete graphics card cost just 20% more I haven't touched no overclocking here and frankly I'm not even gonna bother even if you could push the a 12 no I heard there's something insane like say five point five gigahertz and it's still pretty much just suck of course it can't actually operate that frequency when overclocked I have heard of people getting it up to about 4.8 gigahertz and at that frequency it still struggles to keep pace with the G 45 60 while drawing something like three times more power faster memory would no doubt help assuming the memory controller can handle it but even with ddr4 4000 memory for example isn't going to save the bristol ridge cpus as we saw with the same ddr4 2400 memory as the g 45 60 we saw less than half the available bandwidth there really is no saving grace here in my opinion I mean I am these intention was obviously to feed the OEM channels with these rubbish chips and get rid of them and it seems now they're just trying to buy a bit of time before the Zen based ap use arrive next year and they're probably trying to push these on the back of the success that rise ins had but in my opinion never really just tainted the a m4 platform with an architecture we'd all just like to forget and I would have thought AMD pretty much felt the same way anyway my advice is simple just don't buy these chips they're really just garbage and I know that sounds harsh but well that's my honest opinion so wait for the real deal as I do expect the Zen based AP used to really be something quite special and they will no doubt give Intel quite a few headaches that's gonna do it for this one I'm your host Steve see you next time guys