Three AMD AM1 Motherboards For The Kabini APU, Reviewed

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Targeting power-misers, AMD’s low-energy Kabini-based APUs could easily find their way into entertainment PCs, office machines, and PoS terminals. Of course, you need a motherboard to make it a “platform” and we found three companies willing to help.

Results: 3DMark and PCMark

The major reason to benchmark similar platforms is to look for trouble spots. When we don’t find any, we really don’t have much to say. Our 3DMark 11 results, for example, look equally terrible on all three motherboards, and the situation gets even worse in 3DMark Professional. Although the 600 MHz Radeon-branded graphics engine sporting 128 shaders sounds like it could be moderately capable, this isn't a platform you'd want to do much gaming on.

PCMark is a fairly good test for the “performance feel” of a storage subsystem. Even though our benchmarks don't run very fast, the Kabini APU’s integrated SATA 6Gb/s controller does a great job of facilitating quick transfer from our Samsung 840 Pro SSD.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.