How to take full advantage of apu.

patricklyons28 · Jul 21, 2014

Recently i purchased the AMD A10-7850K APU to add on to my rig. After playing with the new apu for a while i feel like im not getting the maximum performance out of it. I have looked into the R7 series of video cards to work with my apu but that also strings a few questions: can i have a nvidia and an amd card SLI? Could i even add another graphics card due to the mother board only having a PCI and a PCIe slot left?

Sorry if this question is a little messy and/or posted in wrong spot. Thanks in advance for taking your time for viewing this thread.

Specs:
processor: AMD A10-7850K APU
video card: MSI geforce GTX 660 twin frozer 3
motherboard: A88XM-A
Memory: 8 Gb ddr3

i7Baby · Jul 21, 2014

Have lots of fast ram. Keep the apu cool.

You can't have amd and nvidia sli. sli needs 2 of the same nvidia.

You can add a graphics card to your motherboard if you have a pcie2.0 or 3.0 x8 or x16 slot empty.

Zircoben · Jul 21, 2014

patricklyons28 :

What is going on? Is the CPU bottlenecking your games, resulting in frame drops and intermittent performance?

DroneDroneDrone · Jul 21, 2014

Yeah, fast RAM will help as i7 said. You can also crossfire it with a r7 250 or r7 240

Zircoben · Jul 21, 2014

DroneDroneDrone :

Read the original post. He's using a GTX 660. Fast RAM makes no difference unless you are using the integrated GPU.

patricklyons28 · Jul 21, 2014

Zircoben :

patricklyons28 :

What is going on? Is the CPU bottlenecking your games, resulting in frame drops and intermittent performance?

No, i just feel like im not taking full advantage of the apu. Some untapped power.

i7Baby · Jul 21, 2014

Anything specific - low fps in a game? Is your A10 bottlenecking the 660? - gets to 100% usage before the 660.

patricklyons28 · Jul 21, 2014

i7Baby :

I don't think either component is bottlenecking eachother (when running bioshock infinite the apu and gpu both hover at around 50%). I just feel like im not using the apu part of the cpu fully. I also get a bit of screen tearing if that means anything.

ILoveYouTaco · Jul 21, 2014

Knowing that I have a very similar APU, I think I'm well placed to answer this question.
What he is referring to in the question with the R7 crossfire, is the Hybrid Crossfire that AMD APU's are capable of. They basically double performance of the IGP. However, your graphics card is much more powerful than that crossfire ever could be. So what I recommend is faster RAM. You have a decent amount of RAM, but DDR3-2133 is very beneficial to the speed of your APU. As to your complaints of speed drops, your configuration seems to be well balanced, so I'm not sure to where the problem is. I would actually look into a high temperature issue, as I know that APU's suffer from those (mine). Hope that what I said could be helpful.

i7Baby · Jul 21, 2014

You don't need to use the 'apu' - the integrated graphics. The gtx660 will be 100x more powerful.

ILoveYouTaco · Jul 21, 2014

I7...that's pretty much the whole gist of my big paragraph...

palladin9479 · Jul 21, 2014

Well since you have a powerful GDDR5 dGPU then iGPU is virtually useless. Now realize that the chips total power envelope is shared between the CPU and iGPU and thus if you were to start using the iGPU it would limit the power you could use to overclock the CPU. The way you get "full power" is to disable the iGPU fully and overclock the CPU as high as possible.

ILoveYouTaco · Jul 21, 2014

Wow people are just kinda saying what I said but with different wording. -_-

DubbleClick · Jul 21, 2014

You want to take advantage of your "apu"? APU means accelerated processing unit, which refers to co-processors to your cpu which might be of the form of an integrated GPU, which is I believe you are referring to. To make it simple: you have a 660 gtx, so you can't use your integrated gpu.
As for the sli part of a radeon and nvidia card, that doesn't work. Next time please form understandable questions, if you want understandable answers.

Zircoben · Jul 21, 2014

patricklyons28 :

Zircoben :

No, i just feel like im not taking full advantage of the apu. Some untapped power.

Have you bought a CPU cooler such as the Cooler Master 212 EVO and over clocked it? There's a lot of power there, and it may help performance in intensive tasks, but not noticeably anywhere else.

Zircoben · Jul 21, 2014

ILoveYouTaco :

Faster RAM will do NOTHING.

You are using a dedicated GPU, all faster RAM does is increase the integrated graphics performance, which you aren't even using.

It would be a total waste of money to buy faster RAM, and the only way you are going to get better performance is by overclocking your CPU and/or your graphics card.

ILoveYouTaco · Jul 22, 2014

Excuse me zirco, but he is going to be using hybrid crossfire, which uses the igpu and the dedicated gpu of the r7 cards that he was asking for. Because the igpu uses integrated memory, higher RAM band with increases the speed of the igpu. Howwever, as I stated previously, he would be better off NOT doing a hybrid crossfire, as his GTX-660 would be much more powerful. So read up before you criticize.

DubbleClick · Jul 22, 2014

Zircoben :

This is pretty much <mod edit> It might be right for this particular CPU, but not for everything. Read anandtech "memory scaling on haswell".

<Mod Note: Watch your language in the forums>

Zircoben · Jul 22, 2014

Okay, sorry for the confusion, ILoveYouTaco, and DubbleClick. I was under the impression that the OP wanted to keep the GTX 660 (which he should do), in which case faster memory would do essentially nothing.

Faster memory only benefits Kaveri in gaming, with very little computational benefits: http://www.eteknix.com/memory-scaling-amd-kaveri-a10-7850k-apu/4/

What the OP should do is buy a CPU cooler such as the Hyper 212 EVO, and overclock the CPU. Consider selling the 660 and upgrading to a card like the R9 290 or GTX 770. Getting a high-end card like that would likely introduce a CPU bottleneck in some games, so a CPU overclock would be necessary.

Any Crossfire stuff with the APU like ILoveTacos said, will just make your performance worse in games.

How to take full advantage of apu.

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