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

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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.

Power Usage Benchmarks

With the performance story fairly well covered, we turn our attention to evaluating power consumption. The A8-3870K has a 100 W TDP, and the Pentium G620 and Radeon HD 6670 combination is about 131 W combined. Keep in mind the TDP is the maximum rated thermal limit, but it's not necessarily the actual ceiling you'd see running a real world load.

At idle, the stock APU uses less power than our host/graphics processor combo. Additionally, the less-complex Radeon HD 6550D GPU is more energy-friendly under load than the discrete card. Crank up the processor, though, and AMD's four cores consume significantly more power than Intel's two. With both a graphics and host processor load applied, the results are similar.

Overclocking doesn't do AMD's solution any favors. A combination of higher voltage and elevated clock rates push system power consumption up significantly at idle, yes. But the 100+ W jump under a mixed graphics/processing load is particularly disappointing.

312 Comments Comment from the forums
  • tristan_b 29 February 2012 11:48
    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 29 February 2012 11:53
    try the i3 2105 vs the g630 and the 6670 and see the results.
    Reply
  • dragonsqrrl 29 February 2012 11:55
    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 29 February 2012 11:57
    not surprised here.
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty 29 February 2012 11:58
    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 $140 which means they are about the same in price. The mobos, RAM and other stuff will be about the same. I have said it before, but it still holds true. Llano is great for the modile sector. In laptops it will be the best value for lower end laptops to provide a decent gaming setup. Not maxed but still better than what HD3K can do. But on DT, its mostly pointless as it uses a sub par CPU with a decent IGP.
    Reply
  • Zero_ 29 February 2012 12:11
    Nice. Something I've always debated to include in my blog (my sig). The G620 + HD6670 always won out in my book. Good to see a confirmation from Toms.
    Reply
  • tigrc 29 February 2012 12:55
    Intel Pentium G620 has TDP of 65W, not 35. G620T has TDP of 35W. :)
    Reply
  • ohim 29 February 2012 13:16
    And yet Tom`s managed to miss out something ... the CPU + video card might be the same price as the AMD APU but the Intel motherboard is 50+$ more than the one used in the AMD system .. at least in my country.
    Reply
  • saturnus 29 February 2012 13:25
    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 29 February 2012 13:44
    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