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

By Don Woligroski
published

What can you get for $140? How about AMD's top-of-the-line A8-3870K APU with four CPU cores and an integrated Radeon HD 6550D? That's also enough for a Pentium G620 and discrete Radeon HD 6670. We benchmark both to uncover the best budget-oriented option.

Benchmark Results: Metro 2033

We’ll begin our game testing with Metro 2033, a demanding title equally capable of taxing host and graphics processors.

These numbers suggest a slight minimum frame rate advantage favoring the A8-3870K, while the Pentium/Radeon combo manages a much higher average. Let’s take a closer look at the frame rates over time:

The results appear quite close. As you can see, the discrete graphics card facilitates a high frame rate at the end of the benchmark. But during the rest of the run, performance maps pretty similarly. In this title, specifically, it's hard to pinpoint any practical difference between the three tested configurations. Curiously, the overclock doesn’t accomplish much.

Unfortunately, we had to drop our test resolution all the way to 1024x768 in order to get playable performance. If that's too low for you to accept, know that none of these setups will deliver a satisfying experience. Getting the most out of Metro 2033 simply requires more platform horsepower.

Don Woligroski
312 Comments Comment from the forums
  • tristan_b
    Well of course the option with a better gpu will win in gaming. A dual core sandy bridge is enough for almost any game on max these days. If you paired the apu with a 6670, I'm sure we would see different results.
    Reply
  • esrever
    try the i3 2105 vs the g630 and the 6670 and see the results.
    Reply
  • dragonsqrrl
    tristan_bIf you paired the apu with a 6670, I'm sure we would see different results.Ya, that would also cost a lot more then $140.
    Reply
  • iam2thecrowe
    not surprised here.
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    tristan_bWell of course the option with a better gpu will win in gaming. A dual core sandy bridge is enough for almost any game on max these days. If you paired the apu with a 6670, I'm sure we would see different results.
    Actually in most games it should act the same if its just the GPU as most games will be bottlenecked by the mid end GPU. If you include the hybrid CFX (If the A8 can work with the 6670) it will be a bit better in some cases.

    The power draw is very interesting. The CPU load on the A8 is almost as much as a mix of CPU and GPU. It could be a sign of the 32nm still not being mature enough. But it does look better than FX by a lot in power draw.

    Still interesting idea. The G620 plus the HD6670 is about $130 vs $140 which means they are about the same in price. The mobos, RAM and other stuff will be about the same. I have said it before, but it still holds true. Llano is great for the modile sector. In laptops it will be the best value for lower end laptops to provide a decent gaming setup. Not maxed but still better than what HD3K can do. But on DT, its mostly pointless as it uses a sub par CPU with a decent IGP.
    Reply
  • Zero_
    Nice. Something I've always debated to include in my blog (my sig). The G620 + HD6670 always won out in my book. Good to see a confirmation from Toms.
    Reply
  • tigrc
    Intel Pentium G620 has TDP of 65W, not 35. G620T has TDP of 35W. :)
    Reply
  • ohim
    And yet Tom`s managed to miss out something ... the CPU + video card might be the same price as the AMD APU but the Intel motherboard is 50+$ more than the one used in the AMD system .. at least in my country.
    Reply
  • saturnus
    ohimAnd yet Tom`s managed to miss out something ... the CPU + video card might be the same price as the AMD APU but the Intel motherboard is 50+$ more than the one used in the AMD system .. at least in my country.
    Here too. And they could have used the difference on better memory which is known to bottleneck the Llanos. That would probably have pulled the Llano ahead in all tests, not just power consumption.
    Reply
  • tlmck
    Would have been interesting to see 1866 ram used with the APU. Other sites such as Anandtech have shown it to noticeably boost performance. Conversely, there is no advantage to 1600 speed on the Intel. Stock 1333 would have worked the same.
    Reply