Productivity Benchmarks
We perform our productivity-oriented benchmarks on systems equipped with the previous-gen Core i7-2720QM quad-core and -2640M dual-core processors. In addition, we added a 45 W Core i7-3720QM quad-core chip to show the difference an extra 10 W makes up against the GX60’s 35 W APU.
The GX60’s AMD A10-4600M APU takes more than twice as long to encode videos as the Core i7-2720QM. However, these HandBrake results come with the caveat that the current release does not support OpenCL acceleration, which offloads much of the workload to a compatible GPU. Running the current beta of HandBrake with OpenCL support cut the A10’s cut encoding times in half, putting it very close to the quad-core Core i7s. Once the OpenCL-enabled version of HandBrake goes stable, the A10-4600M may be at the top of this chart.
While Premiere Pro CS6 does support OpenCL to speed up certain effects and playback, Adobe Media Encoder does not. This means that Premier Pro CS6 is faster with AMD GPU acceleration in the actual program, but once you export the video for encoding, you’re back to CPU-only.
Once again, the AMD A10-4600M is half the speed of the quad-core -i7 chips. Should Adobe enable OpenCL acceleration in Media Encoder, the A10 might have a shot at catching up.
The CPU-only Photoshop CS6 results continue to show similar performance.
CPU-only file compression testing also shows the AMD APU lagging behind the Intel CPUs.
When we consider the productivity performance measurements taken from the GX60, there are several things to note:
- First, the measurements are meant to help evaluate CPU performance versus other CPUs. The A10-4600M's x86 cores cannot keep up with offerings from Intel. However, as more applications fully support OpenCL, this will quickly change since the A10 sports a very nice built-in GPU (not to mention the GX60's top-of-the-line discrete 7970M).
- Second, you need to make sure that you have your priorities in order. The GX60 has one purpose: serious gaming for the least money possible. If you need more productivity performance, go buy a machine with a faster CPU. You'll either need to pay more or sacrifice GPU performance in the process, though. If all you want to do is game, the only thing you should worry about is whether your CPU is fast enough to not bottleneck the GPU.
Despite comparatively low scores, the GX60 is responsive enough in everyday casual use. And as you are about to see, it’s also very capable in real-world games.
