APU vs CPU

[travismontana]

should I get a computer at bestbuy thats a APU thats 1.8 ghz or keep my rig with amd athlon 64 x2 at 2.3? whats better APU or CPU

 

[Welve]

What do you want to do? AMD's APU is just a low level 6000 GPU combined with a CPU, it will perform adequately in gaming situations. Sandy Bridge will perform similarly, a friend has a Sandy Bridge laptop and it runs Borderlands poorly, but it runs. The advantage of an AMD Llano is you can crossfire it with a low level 6000 level GPU for a modest performance boost, but at that point it almost doesn't make sense to do so.

 

[jaguarskx]

I suppose if you are going for one of quad core Llano APUs then it might be worth doing so. But you are not really getting much bang for your buck. Llano APUs basically have an Athlon II CPU core and a basic Radeon HD 6xxx graphics core.

The performance increase from an Athlon 64 to an Athlon II is probably around 7% just base on the design of the of CPU core. You are going from 2 to 4 cores, but your clock speed will drop from 2.3GHz to 1.8GHz. Therefore, games or applications that only use one or two cores will actually be slower because the clock speed drops by 500MHz or about 22%. Since the Athlon II's performance is around 7% better than the Athlon 64, the decrease in performance will probably be around 16%.

Of course if you use programs or play games that can take advantage of 3 or 4 cores, then you can see some performance increase.

It would be better to spend your money on a Phenom II computer, or better yet a computer build around Intel's Sandybridge Core i3 or i5 CPUs.