AMD A10-4600M Review: Mobile Trinity Gets Tested

Test Setup And Benchmarks

We’re keeping the focus on mobility for this launch, with three products to compare. AMD provided us with a laptop equipped with its top-of-the-line A10-4600M APU, a product we’re told will cost somewhere around $600 when it’s made publicly-available (although the company’s press deck indicates a price point closer to $700).  

With similarly-priced Ivy Bridge-equipped notebooks not yet available for testing, we turned to existing products for comparison. We picked a laptop armed with a Core i5-2450M to represent Intel’s comparable effort. And although prices range from $550 to just over $1000 for laptops equipped with this same CPU, most fall in the $660 to $900 range.

To see how Trinity compares to its predecessor, we added a machine equipped with an A8-3500M to the mix. As an added bonus, this laptop is equipped with Dual Graphics, so we were also able to benchmark a discrete Radeon 6630M for comparison in some cases.

AMD’s Trinity test bed came equipped with a 128 GB SSD and two 2 GB sticks of 1600 MT/s DDR3 memory. We’re not convinced that you’d ever find an expensive SSD in a $700 laptop. So, to keep things fair, we used the same SSD and memory in all three platforms. Surprisingly, the Llano-based A8-3500M-equipped system was unwilling to run the memory at 1600 MT/s, instead forcing it to run at 1333 MT/s with lower latencies. With no BIOS options available to manually configure data rates, we were forced to keep it at this speed for our tests.

The most popular laptop resolution for models in this price range is 1366x768, but we’ll benchmark at 1280x800 because it pushes almost exactly the same number of pixels and has better external monitor support. There are fewer (but still a significant) models available shipping at 1600x900, so we’ll test that resolution as well. Finally, we’ll add 1024x600 to the mix. Before you cringe at the thought of gaming at such meager dimensions, consider that  a 27” monitor at 1080p results in about 80 DPI. Setting 1024x600 on a 15” screen results in 85 DPI—higher pixel density.