AMD A8-3850 & Gigabyte A75M-UD2H Review
Testbed
AMD A8-3850 Quad Core APU – 2.90GHz
Gigabyte A75M UD2H
4GB DDR3-1333 Memory
1TB Samsung F3 SATA II Drive
Windows 7 Home Premium
Overclocking
Be advised that overclocking can be rather hit and miss with these processors, depending on the motherboard that you purchase. At present AMD has not yet released a multiplier unlocked Black Edition processor for Socket FM1. As such, all overclocking endeavours are restricted to the HTT Base Clock only. In our case, no meaningful overclock was obtainable and so we will be proceeding with our testing process at reference clock speeds only.
CPU Performance
AIDA Extreme Edition
Returning to its roots by re-estabilishing the AIDA name, the latest iteration of the popular benchmark suite now includes optimisations over previous editions. With this in mind, remember not to compare these results against those conducted with older Everest software.
CPU Queen
CPU Queen is based on branch prediction and the misprediction penalties that are involved.
Right off the bat, we see a sizeable difference in performance between our quad core processors of similar core frequency. Clock for clock, it is apparent that the A8-3850 isn’t much of an improvement over its older Athlon II X4 sibling.
CPU Photoworxx
PhotoWorxx as the name may suggest tests processors by means of invoking functions that are common to Photo Manipulation including Fill, Flip, Crop, Rotate, Difference and Colour to B&W conversion.
Here we can exhibit the operations that Sandy Bridge processors really seem to excel at, where our A8-3850 is left for dead.
CPU ZLib
This is an integer based benchmark that will test the CPU and Memory by means of the CPU ZLib compression library.
The gap narrows considerably in our data compression test. An additional cryptography benchmark based on the AES standard would have been included, but given that the AMD lacks the AES accelerating instruction set, the i5 2300 beats it by hilarious margins; it simply wasn’t worth including.
