


Call of Duty, on the other hand, is playable on the A8-3850’s Radeon HD 6550D core.
At 1680x1050, the speed-up is almost 4x compared to AMD’s previous-generation integrated graphics solution. And it’s almost 2x compared to Intel’s best effort—without anti-aliasing enabled. Apply an even more taxing load using 4x AA and AMD nearly triples Intel’s frame rate.
Because Call of Duty responds so well to platform changes, our decision to standardize on DDR3-1333 does hurt the A8-3850’s numbers a bit. However, we also have the data to show what you’d get with an upgrade to memory running at a higher data rate. You’ve already seen this graph, but here it is again:

The biggest jumps happen when you switch from DDR3-800 to DDR3-1066 and then to DDR3-1333. But there’s another sizable gain in shifting to DDR3-1600, even if it means a command rate of two (from one previously).
The move to DDR3-1866 actually turns out to be detrimental because it requires relaxing a couple of other timings, even if we’re able to maintain CAS 8. The sweet spot here is definitely DDR3-1600 at the lowest latency you can get.
- Meet AMD’s Desktop Llano-Based Lineup
- Dual Graphics: How Does It Perform?
- Dual Graphics: Not Always Your Best Bet
- Chipsets
- Storage Performance
- Making Memory Performance Matter Again
- A Word On Overclocking Llano
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: PCMark 7
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark Vantage
- Benchmark Results: Sandra 2011
- Benchmark Results: Metro 2033 (DirectX 10)
- Benchmark Results: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (DirectX 9)
- Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm (DirectX 9 And 11)
- Benchmark Results: Content Creation
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Media Encoding
- Power Consumption
- Conclusion
Actually Llano on the Desktop is (IMO) aimed at HTPC a 100% and, off course, notebooks.
I would really, really like to see more media features with the Llano parts you guys have if it can be done 8)
Great article as usual!
Cheers!
No shit, really? I wouldn't have thought so, it's just twice the price!
Great review Chris. For the target market AMD is doing a pretty good job here with an old CPU architecture and once they pair this with Bulldozer they should have a killer product.
They don't want you to see better performance from a cheaper APU in single-threaded apps by pushing Turbo Core further ;-)
So is AM3+ going to be retired in favor of FM1 in the near future? Why are there chipset at all? Why isn't everything SOC by now?
Otherwise this is a very good CPU. If AMD has used 1 MB level 2 caches in their quads when they came out with the Deneb Propus die, they would be much more competitive.
what about power consumption?
That's about all the sense it makes then, for mobile and all-in-one units, but for cheap desktops... eh.
Actually Llano on the Desktop is (IMO) aimed at HTPC a 100% and, off course, notebooks.
I would really, really like to see more media features with the Llano parts you guys have if it can be done 8)
Great article as usual!
Cheers!
And I think you guys may have gotten the min and avg FPS scores for the CoD:MW benchmark backwards... How can the min be higher than the average? Maybe you were actually comparing No AA to 4x AA or something, not min and avg FPS?
600Mhz to 840/900Mhz? No problem at all.
Anyway, The real show should be bulldozer-based APU's. If they could just get the graphics up to a 5750 level...
As for a higher end desktop, I am waiting for BD and how it affects the market. That will determine which parts I keep and which parts get put into an HTPC.