Battle At $140: Can An APU Beat An Intel CPU And Add-In Graphics?

Test System And Benchmarks

Intel LGA 1155 motherboards start at $50 on Newegg, while AMD Socket FM1 boards start at about $60. Because of this, we think the comparison is quite fair, despite the fact that both of our test boards cost more than $100. Spending more money on a motherboard doesn’t get you more performance; it gets you additional features and, potentially, more overclocking headroom. This is something we’ve proven many times in our motherboard round-ups, though sometimes we're surprised by low-cost boards that serve up impressive scalability.

We’re using Gigabyte’s Radeon HD 6670 for our exploration. It features an 800 MHz core and 1600 MT/s DDR3 clocks. This particular model currently sells for $80 on Newegg, and it comes with a free Sonic Generations game coupon. Other models with comparable clocks and fewer bundled extras can be found in the $70 price range.

The A8-3870 is tested at its shipping clocks, of course. But because it's also equipped with an unlocked multiplier, we also pushed the processor to its highest stable overclock, with voltage set to 1.515 V, yielding a 3.6 GHz CPU frequency and 960 MHz GPU.