Apologies - first one was a brain fart, second was carry over. Tables like that I have to write in HTML (via excel) then copy paste in. Somehow got a weird mishmash of the last review and the new one.
"Thus if I purchase an i7-3960X today, I know that it will fit into Socket 2011 based motherboards - similarly with the i5-2500K, it will fit into Socket 1156 motherboards. "
I am not AMD fanboi but I am a fan of new computer hardware. As such I tend to grab some of the latest stuff. The thing about AMD boards (that I've noticed) is to get something comparable from Intel your usually looking at 30-50 more. Their boards are feature rich at a lower premium.
This board in particular, (and Gigabyte's alternative) is over priced. I'd say by 20 bucks. But it's new hardware, slight price premium.. I expect in coming months this board will be 110-120 and the CPU it's paired with will drop to in and around the same price.
I consider myself more leaning toward AMD,but Trinity has no place in enthusiast world.
It was made as low to medium all-in-one (cheap) solution and as such, it works great. Why would anyone put mid-high end GPU with trinity is beyond my imagination. Even if you say you start with Trinity, then add G-card doesn't hold the true, because your CPU performance will suffer.Better start with strong CPU (probably Intel) and basic graphics card, and then later add something much stronger.At the end,you will have strong system.
150USD for Trinity oriented motherboard is not overkill.It is plain stupid.
Ian, What do you think about pairing a low end FM2 processor with a micro ATX version of an A85 or A75 board
Benefits I can see for small office machine that has standard admin workloads - (to compete with the recent budget systems buyer guide say with the pentium G530 recommendation).
Buy going with the Trinity you get -
lower idle power consumption and mostly this builds will run word-excel etc..., so lower TCO Ability to run 2 monitors and keep lowish power (no need for new GFX) also better GFX in general Ability to upgrade / more flexibility - with one more processor release arriving for FM2 next year and better chipset options. Can run encryption / AES - ok not a great processor choice in general but as more small firms realise how important security is, it could be as simple as running 7zip 256 Bit encryption on a few files before emailing them - the processor is not handicapped and Trinity should buy and sell the Pentium in speed.
So take an AMD A4-5300 - 65 USD, and some A85 micro atx variant for say 70 USDand pair it will an Samsung 830/840/ Intel 330128 GB SSD I would suggest this might be a better long term platform than the Intel/G530 combo recommended in the value system buyers guide.
What's the cost? An Extra 40 USD on the low end intel?
Would work fine I'd expect.. but without hands on testing of a lower end FM2 part .. I'd be rather curious about it's overall performance.. Looking at bench results the A10 5800K is in and around 1156 I5 performance (slightly lower on single thread) but very comparable to Quad9X C2D stuff.. which is decent overall with all the additions that come with future tech and ofcourse the graphics.
I rather like the 5800/A85X combo myself but it should be about $40 bucks cheaper then it currently is. Still.. not having a problem with it on our secondary system (a 2700K build for the main..) It's certainly fast enough.
Also, one of the things I've seen reviewers mention is .. these new Trinity based setups could make quite the showing in the office or in the living room. I plan on setting up a low cost option for our living room as more selections in boards start to come out..
.. I also like the fact that the system stays cool.. a major complaint of mine with the Ivy Bridge cpu's that rarely gets even a mention.
In that article Zach recommends a Intel Celeron G530 which is insanely cheap at USD 30 but doesn't have some of the instruction sets that AMD don't cut out from cheaper models.
With the motherboard there's about 100 dollars to play with for CPU and Mobo. A75X + low end FM2 - well there just might be room for the right priced FM 2 setup - which might even also be lower power and more flexible.
I'm shortly building 4 machines in our office to replace the final load of XP machines (Win7/Office 2010). It's an accounting office and users tend to use alot of excel and quickbooks. Nothing too taxing on the client side. It will be a tough decision between Intel and AMD.
Trinity is more than enough for most office workloads.
I rolled out a load of dual core Atom boxes for office use between 2010-2011.
Yeah dual core Atoms. Quite pathetic in comparison to Trinity but no complaints, I regularly ask the staff how they are getting on with them and they all still love them.
Folks here are just a little too autistic to see that not everyone works (well for some here I bet the term work is an alien concept in the truest sense) like they do or sees the world in such benchmark obsessed terms.
Most folks have been sorted CPU wise for office work since 2005/6. The stuff most of us play with here is for rich kids toys.
I just build 3 of these office machines (prices in euros before VAT / sales tax)
AMD A6-5400K - 50 Asrock FM2A75M - DGS - 45 Fractal Core 1000 - 30 Intel 330 120 GB ssd - 75 Mushkin 4GB ddr3 -1600- 13 Be quiet pure power L7 300w - 32 Win8 pro oem (w/Start8)a 110 Office 2010 pro 100
Hardware comes to €245, and if I could have sourced the A4-5300, would have knocked another 15 off that. Amd will be pricing the entry level FM2 stuff really agressively in Jan 2013 onwards, so you could probably pick up the A4-5300 for 30 euro. , WEI scores are: Processor: 6.3, Memory: 5.9, Graphics: 4.7, Gaming Graphics: 6.3, primary hard disk, 8.1.
Will test power consumption shortly, but just seeing the load on the CPU with excel, word, and chrome with 5 browser windows open, it hovers around 1- 4%, so meaning for these light usage cases, it might be cheaper to run than the intel options (that would be a real turn up for the books).
> From my perspective, a storage system the RAID 5 that the A85X chipset supports across the eight SATA 6 Gbps ports is golden where Trinity is concerned.
Except that anyone running an 8-drive RAID5 with large, slow, consumer off the shelf SATA drives is either uninformed or a moron.
Odds on getting an unrecoverable read error with large (1TB+) drives during a RAID5 rebuild are incredibly high; that's why enterprise SANs are using things like 450GB/600GB SAS drives now, and those have a failure rate an order of magnitude lower than consumer grade SATA.
Home servers should be using RAID1, 10, Z, Z2 - or just none at all. Whatever you use, doing proper backups (which RAID is not) is critical if you care about your data. DVDs I've ripped? I can get those again. Pictures of my son's first birthday? Backed up in triplicate, multiple offsite, and cloud stored.
First of if you're calling someone a moron, maybe you should look in the mirror.
The article that you linked was written back in 2007, and if you read some of the comments, many of the comments thought it was much ado about nothing.
Maybe you should check out what current cloud based backup companies look like, here's an example that I was just reading about a couple of days ago.
Very interesting story, commercial cloud based storage company that uses consumer SATA drives. They even have open-sourced hardware design(s) available for their PODs that anyone can use to create their own muti-drive backup system, and which several others have created, if you are so inclined that way.
I am no way involved with Backblaze, just was an interesting story piece that I ran across and their tale of harvesting consumer grade 3TB SATA drives in the aftermath of the Thailand flooding.
The article was correct then and even more now. As data density has increased, reliability has not kept pace.
Using BackBlaze, or most any "cloud backup provider" as a reference for pro-RAID-5 is a bad idea. Cloud storage providers create their redundancy at the system level. Reliability, availability, and operational efficiencies are all hugely increased by treating the entire system as an FRU. It's cheaper for them to just wait for there to be enough downed pods to justify "Okay, let's roll into the DC, pull out a dozen systems, and slap in new ones." They don't have the time or concern to troubleshoot individual drive failures.
(Also, BackBlaze uses RAID-6.)
So again, if you're using RAID-5 with big, slow, error-prone drives; please stop doing that if you care about your data.
What version of the AHCI, RAID and USB 3.0 BIOS is on this new board? It would be very helpful if you could include the version of these BIOS's in your board reviews. Since it is very easy to updated the firmware of these components outside of a regular motherboard BIOS update it can be very helpful to increase performance and other issues that arise especially with RAID configurations and newer SSD drives.
Ian, glad you mentioned hysteresis. I dont understand why they dont incorporate this control? Its fairly simple as long as a target temperature is defined.
"This could be an error on the part of OCCT.." If you do not know what the problem is then why mention it in the review as a performance concern. Either OCCT is updated to work with Trinity or more than likely it is not but find out before you state it. As to DPC latency, is it really a EFI problem or a platform problem as Llano is not much better.
Why bother? An Ivy Bridge i3 is 55w and is close to the equivalent except for the GPU, less than a fart's difference CPU wise. Compared to a hot 100w CPU, if you don't game, this isn't worth bothering with. At all for a standard office box. As for the mobo, I'd prefer a gruntier CPU than fancy useless heatpipes.
Have you used ivy bridge or even set up any? Those puppies get quite warm and temperatures are all over the place. Hell I opted for a 2700K just because of that and prices were comparable. Using the 5800 (been working with it a few days now) it runs cool rarely going over 35C and usually staying in the low 20s in my 10 year old lian-li case (/w 3 80mm fans.. doesn't support bigger ones)
amd fanboy fails again. It's getting irritating with your idiocy and lies and pretense as if you know something. You know exactly nothing.
" In case of single-threaded load processors with different microarchitectures demonstrate dramatically different levels of power consumption. And here we have every right to state that Ivy Bridge microarchitecture is the most energy-efficient among all testing participants. Core i3 manufactured with 22 nm process do win the promised 8-10 W of power from their predecessors and demonstrate overwhelming advantage over the competitor’s offerings. "
No doubt that Core i3 processors from the new 3000 series will make the most energy-efficient systems. Their power consumption and therefore heat dissipation are significantly lower than by all other platforms, and their advantages over the systems with dual-core Sandy Bridge processors is between 10 and 20 W. This makes Core i3 with Ivy Bridge microarchitecture a perfect choice for compact and energy-efficient systems. And, by the way, for these particular systems Intel has special energy-efficient Core i3 CPU modifications with 35 W TDP instead of 55 W.
LOL - the amd fanboy spews his lies, and gets owned, again, after insulting the poster WHO IS CORRECT.
At a few points in the article, Ian mentions that the chipset supports RAID5 and might therefore be a good candidate for a SOHO NAS system. My question is, does anyone who builds a SOHO NAS system actually use these integrated hardware RAIDs?
Sure, nothing beats a good and proper RAID controller, but those cost upward of $300 and from experience, these integrated RAID controllers barely perform well. They are generally much slower than software RAID, and tougher to recover from failures. Nearly everyone I know who has built their own NAS goes for software RAID, and any modern OS has better software RAID than these chipsets generally provide.
The other reason not to consider Trinity for a NAS build is that power consumption is generally a major factor in a device that's 24/7 on, and Ivy Bridge beats Trinity in that regards hands down. Also, Trinity's main advantage over Ivi Bridge, that of a better GPU, is of no use in a NAS.
So, I ask again, is Trinity actually such a good choice for a NAS build? I see a place for it in a HTPC build, but pretty much in nothing else.
If they still don't have that done, how are they going to keep up with all of the Windows releases set to hit in 2 weeks? Flagship Windows phones and tablets probably deserve just as much attention as the iPhone and there are releases covering the whole value spectrum. I hope the iPad Mini doesn't get some 20 page review while windows tablets get the standard windows laptop type review.
Ian mentions a few times the motherboard - at $140 - appears overpriced for the performance & such. And yes, this Trinity sku is only somewhat comparable to an i3. But isn't the point of Trinity + FM2 to be somewhat future-insulated? As in, drop in another FM2 sku 6-12 months from now and watch your CPU & GPU performance skyrocket? Didn't AMD say FM2 is going to be around for the this gen and the next gen of processors?
You might still have to be abit of an AMD fan boy to buy this combo now, but it would make a solid work PC and/or light gaming PC and a year from now, I bet $125 would drop in a huge boost in performance, without having to replace the rest of your system.
"But isn't the point of Trinity + FM2 to be somewhat future-insulated?"
This depends on whether FM2 fades as quickly as FM1 and the length of time implied by 'somewhat'. Perhaps FM1 was around for 'somewhat' of a long time...maybe.
HTPC - checked. Cheap file-server (8 x SATA 3 ports is great - I wonder whether mATX boards will have all 8) - checked. Home Office / light gaming - checked.
You make it sound A85X boards are somehow below average when it comes to number of ports, 7 ports is more than any Z77 or A75 based boards, if you have a fileserver that needs all 8 ports, then I'd suggest you buy a dedicated Sata controller for better performance anyway.
But it's so easy to get a cheap sata card without RAID support and just use software raid (freenas comes to mind).
Why deal with buggy controllers anyway. Modern software raid is easily configurable and very fault tolerant, and you can even do things like SSD caching at the front end.
I do intend to build a NAS / server, and it's either Trinity or an i3.
I will try with Windows Server 2012 and Storage Spaces myself. I need Windows for my server at home. Hopefully it can make a logical drive with parity from different types of physical drives... or I got it all wrong. :-)
TDP is way too high. That means significant active cooling, that means noise.
Do not mind having one slow fan in an HTPC but not more.
AMd need to have a sub 45W part on an FM2 board for it to be good for an HTPC. Do that at reasonable cost and AMD would clean up as nearest equivalent for intel is the i7-3770T which is expensive
TDP is acceptable on both A10, 5700 and 5800 65W and even 100W can be cooled passively with the right HTPC case(Streacom FC5-OD). You can also buy a Jetway Mini ITX FS1r2 board that will work with A10-4600(35W TDP). If Mobile sockets is too exotic for you, it should take no time to adjust the A10 of any kind really, ,to run a 3GHz and get the tdp below 45W, but eally since when was 65W too much for one slow fan?
The Streacom case is btw. confirmed, I'm using it to cool down my current A8-3870k, works perfectly.
Streamcom FC5 specs are for a maximum of 65W TDP so 100W is outside of their envelope. 65W TDP will work fine, just as long as the room is not too warm. So I guess your A8-3870 is either under-clocked or currently in the fridge!!
For an HTPC, it needs to play HD material smoothly, rip HD content quickly and I assume play some games at reasonable speed but nothing too taxing.
i7-3770T is way over-powered (and expensive) for that - and not as cool as it should be because intel use poor thermal paste on the IHS. AMD should therefore clean up this market. I prefer to have a CPU that is under the case thermal envelope to allow for margin for error.
So if it works for you (and I really like the Streamcom case) great, but for me AMD need to get a 22 nm part out with a much lower thermal envelope
1. Normally when a reviewer sees something anomalous he contacts the manufacturer prior to posting the review. Has there been any follow up with ASUS on the DPC latency spikes? Is a BIOS fix actually forthcoming? It's really hard to just leave it at "this would be slightly worrying for audio work"!
2. The USB and SATA charts are nearly pointless. You're comparing a new AMD chipset against umpteen Intel motherboards. That's reasonable, but how does this new A85X chipset fare against older AMD 9xx chipsets? Is this new chipset an improvement? And if it isn't better, do they have an explanation why? And wouldn't that be another thing to ask ASUS about?
3. Speaking of older chipsets, why does the Sabretooth only make a cameo? The X264 graphs are just silly! I thought we wanted a comparison between Thuban and Llano here, not just umpteen Core i7s! You did say "For AMD, this means we can compare the new Piledriver modules to Llano with its Stars cores, Phenom II and Thuban, and Zambezi with Bulldozer."
4. With all these gobbledygook-named motherboards floating around, it sure would be nice if the "gaming benchmarks" graphs also denoted which (admittedly also gobbledygook-named) CPU was paired with each one. Like the "computation benchmarks" did. It would simplify validating statements like "Portal 2 seems to enjoy the GPU power, and CPU power does not matter as much.".
5. On Dirt 3 "In the case of Trinity, the lack of grunt by the CPU does give it a lower result than the rest of our testing."
Be that as it may, where does it stand compared with the Core i3? Thuban? Llano? Trinity isn't even meant to (and certainly can't) compete with Core i7, so why are these graphs so dominated by them? I wouldn't expect radical fluctuations between the Intel chipset boards. Are you looking for motherboard-influenced performance quirks? If so, shouldn't you also be comparing multiple A85X motherboards?
6. Above ALL else, this is a new chipset. Accordingly, have you done any stability and reliability testing? Speed is nice, but what good is it if the new fangled SATA3 and USB3 ports exhibit device compatibility issues or data corruption? (Have you done a "diff" of your files in Linux? Or noted any bus reset errors in Linux logfiles? You know...the kinds of things Windows never tells you?)
1) Interestingly enough it is not a reviewers job to debug. I do correlate my results to the manufacturers, but I test on the latest publicly available BIOS at the time of testing. If I sat around waiting for 'the next BIOS' then each review would take 3x as long and I couldn't feed my family. Sorry to disappoint. (Also, not all reviewers are masculine as per your pronoun usage.)
2) The USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gbps are both native on Intel and AMD unless specified otherwise. I believe it is an appropriate comparison. People deciding to upgrade will want a comparison between what is available now in the market, not what was on the market. There is scope for editorials to look at how certain dynamics have changed over the years, but also tests change. My old data for 9xx chipsets is not relevant here.
3) Again, tests change over time in order to correlate with newer hardware and test the capabilities. If you have the spare time to dig out the hardware and run the newer tests, that's up to you. The other 14 motherboards I have in needed to be tested get priority here otherwise they become irrelevant. I would love to have infinite hardware and infinite time to do the comparisons, but that is not a logistical possibility.
4) Each chipset is tested against a single CPU. P67/Z68 was i5-2500K, X79 was i7-3960X, FM1 was A6-3650, FM2 was A10-5800K.
5) My apologies, next time I'll forgo the initial release review because it's the only board in my hand before release and wait a few months until I have six reviewed then post them at once when they become a little irrelevant.
6) Have you? Have you got time to do stability testing? What about testing it at high altitude, or in the Sahara?
If you believe there are things missing from the review, helpfully suggest additions for future consideration. My email is through my name on the review.
"With that being said, it is clear that video conversion is an INT process and all four of the A10-5800K INT units are being used"
Are they, though? If so, it's a bit disappointing. Are all four threads maxed out in Task Manager? It'd be interesting to see a 4C/4T Intel processor thrown in there (2500K seems a perfect candidate) as well.
From looking at this, it should mean that an identically clocked Piledriver (83xx) CPU wouldn't be too far behind the 3770K in this one test. It does also mean, unfortunately, that even with linear performance scaling, even the top Piledriver CPU won't dethrone Thuban in the 3DPM MP test.
What does is this line in the performance section supposed to mean? QUOTE: From a practical standpoint, the lack of floating point units in the CPU gives cause for concern as not everyone codes in hex or integer style (my own personal software all uses FP – INT would be confusing to code for me for negligible gain on most architectures). /QUOTE:
I'm assuming you are referring to the bulldozer/steamroller architecture with a shared FPU unit per pair of integer units. On first reading it implies (and this implication is uncontested by the bizarre contents of of the following parentheses) that there is no floating point unit on the chip. That is patently wrong as there is a rather nice FPU shared between every two integer cores.
The other interpretation is that you think it needs MORE than half an FPU per core. That is an arguable point, but then the strange text in the parentheses paints you as someone who needs much more study towards what actually happens in a program. So much of your normal computing occurs in integer space. There isn't really any sort of program I can easily think of where you don't use integer operations (even memory mapping is integer) many times in order to prepare to do a single FP operation. The counter examples are all pretty much graphics examples where we want to work on vectors. The Trinity FPU has a nice vector processor too. If you break down and look at the machine code that any of your programs use you will find that an overwhelming (much greater than 66%) of that code is integer code.
Crying OH NOES 1/2 A FPU, is not good reporting. YES the AMD chips lag the Intel chips, YES the design parameters are different. The unfounded supposition that performance difference are due to that specific portion of the architectural choice is frankly bad journalism. If you want to make claims like that you have to point to a set of benchmarks that demonstrate clearly that the 1/2 FPUs are to blame. I doubt this is the case as most analysis that I've seen points to larger memory subsystem problems as a much bigger factor.
If your supposition is true, then the A10-5800K should not experienced as much of a decrease against the competition as it did do in the results.
My 3DPM results clear my position on the matter:
"In the single threaded test, a lot of conclusions can be drawn from the comparison of AMD architectures. Direct comparison of Piledriver to Bulldozer (A10-5800K to FX-8150) gives a boost in single core performance of 7%, however comparing the old Stars cores of the A8-3850 at 2.9 GHz is roughly the same as the new Piledriver core at 4.2 GHz. So even with a 1.3 GHz advantage, Piledriver is only as good as Stars and less efficient in floating point results. If we compare Piledriver to Thuban, i.e. A10-5800K to X6 1100T, the Piledriver core gets stomped on by a good 25% performance. I find this quite staggering – most of the code I ever encountered as a computational chemist was floating point based, dealing with single and double precision on a regular basis. On this result, I would steer clear of Piledriver.
The multithreaded version of 3DPM is slightly tougher to analyze. Due to the FP nature of the program, the A10-5800K is essentially a 2 core FPU processor, whereas all the other comparative AMD processors have either 4 or 6 FPUs to play with. What is perhaps worth considering is that the Bulldozer processor with 4 modules scores 326.32, whereas the Piledriver processor with only 2 modules scores 203.06, which is more than half. This would mean that the Piledriver core actually achieves 20% better performance at the same frequency, despite our ST test giving Piledriver only a 7% increase. Part of this could be put down to the architecture improvements – improved scheduling for heavily threaded loads, one of the downfalls of Bulldozer but was improved in Piledriver could be the reason here."
My basis for my comments is from a computational complexity standpoint. Sure memory mapping may be an int process, but if I only do it at the beginning and end of a matrix transformation (and thereby having a total processing time less than 0.1% of the program) then it becomes insignificant.
What AMD have done is project that applications in the future which require heavy computational throughput will be driven by INT ops. The big software vendors can do this, making video conversion and ray tracing type applications enhanced by use of INT ops. But for the non-CompSci scientist who relies more on readable code but also wants a speed increase, then going all out on the INT side may not be possible, and we get limited performance due to the scheduling and the lack of pure grunt due to the gutted APU. It's a design choice AMD have to live with, and I'm not the only one who is not entirely in favor of it.
Ok, I'm trying not to break down and just buy a Llano for my HTPC build, but does anybody know how much longer it'll be till I can get some nice options for a mini-ITX such as http://news.softpedia.com/news/MSI-Presents-FM2-A7... and the 5700k? What's the holdup on these!
AMD should play to their strengths which is an affordable CPU with a relatively fast integrated GPU. That means focusing a small form factor systems such as AIO, ITX, HTPC class systems, however, I am surprised and disappointed at the relative lack of options when it comes to ITX FMx motherboards. I sold my AMD stock when I concluded they had their strategy wrong. Most folks who want to use a full sized case would also want to use a dedicated GPU, otherwise, what's the point of having a full sized case? Wrong marketing choice.
Unless AMD can improve their heat/power ratings, the Intel G530 makes better sense as a NAS solution as it is dirt cheap and uses less power than its advertised 65w TDP while running circles around the Atom class processors. I hope AMD is reading the forums and best luck to them.
You are right. Full ATX and Trinity makes little sense. mATX and mini ITX with 8 SATA3 and integrated graphics should be the focus. Full ATX in fact makes little sense today, anyway... :-)
If you want more than a NAS from a server, the best 65W Trinity part should be nice. I have a Phenom II X2 rated 80W in my HTPC and an Athlon II X4 (95W) in my server at home. Neither of them comes even closer to their rated TDP, according to the "green" ICs and software of the motherboards (Gigabyte and Asus).
AMD seems to volt their processors conservatively, so K10Stat (or other utilities) or using the BIOS to reduce the voltage may prove useful in reducing power consumption noticably without affecting performance more than a couple of percent.
Toms ran an article on this as regards Trinity, and have done so with various AMD models in the past:
Except for the complete power users I am not sure full ATX makes sense for the vast majority of people no matter what CPU you use.
mAtx has room for 4 PCI-E/PCI slots. even if the GPU takes up 2 slots what do people use the rest for? Sound card, TV tuner then what? [If any one says RAID card - why do you need a discrete GPU for what is effectively a NAS]
Having just built an HTPC using a mini-ITX board it is remarkable what power you can have on tap with just one PCI-E slot
Yea, full ATX is making less and less sense these days. My main system is full sized but most of the systems I own are ITX or smaller. I just slapped together a HTPC using a Cooler Elite120 ITX case, an old GTX-560ti video card,16gb of RAM and an i3-2100 CPU so it double duties as a Home Gaming Theater as well. It is awesome how much power one can squeeze into a small system these days.
Looks like I'm going with the i5 3570K and P8Z77 board combo this time around and I've been a long time AMD user since the late 90's, I was highly interested in the A10 5800K but the benchmarks look ridiculous, especially the gaming benchmarks.
"On AMD the results are better, making the GPU the limiting factor." Please find this sentence in your article and review it for possible errors. After all, how can anything be better on AMD? lol. Seriously I think you meant intel.
OK, a lot of this is right on the edge of my understanding, and as I was about to put together another PC for my kids, the intro on board specs, chipset etc has just got me a bit confused. I was not looking at a Trinity as the budget won't stretch that far, but had come up with the following (actually the boys 13 and 15 did most of the research): Will they work well together, and is there a better combination for the price (or less). Sadly over here in The UK, we can’t get the deals like you folks across the big pond and this lot comes to £450 ($685):
Processor £100 Mobo and graphics card £150 each approximately
AMD Piledriver FX-6 Six Core 6300 Black Edition 3.50GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor Asus Sabertooth 990FX AMD 990FX (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard (how is this different from the R2.0 version) One of the following: Sapphire HD 7850 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card Sapphire HD 7850 OC Edition 2GB Dual DVI HDMI DisplayPort PCI-E Graphics Card Asus HD 7850 DirectCU II V2 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
In retrospect, this should perhaps be a forum post, but having got this far.... Thanks anyway - what a good site, glad I found it
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andykins - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
A 2500k fits into socket 1155, not 1156 - the latter is Nehalem I believe?Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Likewise, the features chart on the first page lists PCIe 3.0 slots...Trinity has PCIe 2.0...IanCutress - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Apologies - first one was a brain fart, second was carry over. Tables like that I have to write in HTML (via excel) then copy paste in. Somehow got a weird mishmash of the last review and the new one.Ian
Kevin G - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
First page, second paragraph:"Thus if I purchase an i7-3960X today, I know that it will fit into Socket 2011 based motherboards - similarly with the i5-2500K, it will fit into Socket 1156 motherboards. "
The i5-2500K fits into socket 1155.
Anonymous Blowhard - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
> This full sized ATX board is aiming for the enthusiast in the Trinity space> enthusiast in the Trinity space
> enthusiast
> Trinity
Nope
djshortsleeve - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Well, AMD fanboi enthusiast maybejust4U - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
I am not AMD fanboi but I am a fan of new computer hardware. As such I tend to grab some of the latest stuff. The thing about AMD boards (that I've noticed) is to get something comparable from Intel your usually looking at 30-50 more. Their boards are feature rich at a lower premium.This board in particular, (and Gigabyte's alternative) is over priced. I'd say by 20 bucks. But it's new hardware, slight price premium.. I expect in coming months this board will be 110-120 and the CPU it's paired with will drop to in and around the same price.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, October 13, 2012 - link
LOL - caught again, and still in public denial.The gaming benchmark page is a shame to the human race and all reporters worldwide, but that's how amd corpo pig pressure rolls.
medi01 - Sunday, October 14, 2012 - link
Do you at least get payed by Intel?Utterly stupid to post so much shit for them for free...
darcotech - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
I totally agree.I consider myself more leaning toward AMD,but Trinity has no place in enthusiast world.
It was made as low to medium all-in-one (cheap) solution and as such, it works great.
Why would anyone put mid-high end GPU with trinity is beyond my imagination.
Even if you say you start with Trinity, then add G-card doesn't hold the true, because your CPU performance will suffer.Better start with strong CPU (probably Intel) and basic graphics card, and then later add something much stronger.At the end,you will have strong system.
150USD for Trinity oriented motherboard is not overkill.It is plain stupid.
medi01 - Sunday, October 14, 2012 - link
What kind of enthusiasts need CPU more than GPU?Urizane - Monday, October 15, 2012 - link
'Enthusiast' is not exactly equal to 'Gamer'. Gamers don't really need a ton of CPU capability. Enthusiasts may have many CPU bound interests.dsrnet - Monday, April 15, 2013 - link
hi,What is the best 4 core processor ( CPU ) ,stating its clock speed,that it supports? ( F2A85-V PRO mother board ), please let me know.
thanks
Aj
tim851 - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
Hehe, my thoughts exactly. I don't hate AMD and wish them a lot of success - primarily for my own sake - but no enthusiast is thinking about Trinity.zappb - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Ian, What do you think about pairing a low end FM2 processor with a micro ATX version of an A85 or A75 boardBenefits I can see for small office machine that has standard admin workloads - (to compete with the recent budget systems buyer guide say with the pentium G530 recommendation).
Buy going with the Trinity you get -
lower idle power consumption and mostly this builds will run word-excel etc..., so lower TCO
Ability to run 2 monitors and keep lowish power (no need for new GFX) also better GFX in general
Ability to upgrade / more flexibility - with one more processor release arriving for FM2 next year and better chipset options.
Can run encryption / AES - ok not a great processor choice in general but as more small firms realise how important security is, it could be as simple as running 7zip 256 Bit encryption on a few files before emailing them - the processor is not handicapped and Trinity should buy and sell the Pentium in speed.
So take an AMD A4-5300 - 65 USD, and some A85 micro atx variant for say 70 USDand pair it will an Samsung 830/840/ Intel 330128 GB SSD I would suggest this might be a better long term platform than the Intel/G530 combo recommended in the value system buyers guide.
What's the cost? An Extra 40 USD on the low end intel?
just4U - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Would work fine I'd expect.. but without hands on testing of a lower end FM2 part .. I'd be rather curious about it's overall performance.. Looking at bench results the A10 5800K is in and around 1156 I5 performance (slightly lower on single thread) but very comparable to Quad9X C2D stuff.. which is decent overall with all the additions that come with future tech and ofcourse the graphics.I rather like the 5800/A85X combo myself but it should be about $40 bucks cheaper then it currently is. Still.. not having a problem with it on our secondary system (a 2700K build for the main..) It's certainly fast enough.
just4U - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Also, one of the things I've seen reviewers mention is .. these new Trinity based setups could make quite the showing in the office or in the living room. I plan on setting up a low cost option for our living room as more selections in boards start to come out.... I also like the fact that the system stays cool.. a major complaint of mine with the Ivy Bridge cpu's that rarely gets even a mention.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, October 13, 2012 - link
LOL - it's all too clear, and has been for a very long time. AMD fanboyzappb - Saturday, October 13, 2012 - link
Throughout the review, Ian was looking for a reason to recommend why someone would buy FM2.In the context of Zach's excellent value buyer's guide here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6182/fall-budget-sys...
In that article Zach recommends a Intel Celeron G530 which is insanely cheap at USD 30 but doesn't have some of the instruction sets that AMD don't cut out from cheaper models.
With the motherboard there's about 100 dollars to play with for CPU and Mobo. A75X + low end FM2 - well there just might be room for the right priced FM 2 setup - which might even also be lower power and more flexible.
I'm shortly building 4 machines in our office to replace the final load of XP machines (Win7/Office 2010). It's an accounting office and users tend to use alot of excel and quickbooks. Nothing too taxing on the client side. It will be a tough decision between Intel and AMD.
jabber - Monday, October 15, 2012 - link
Trinity is more than enough for most office workloads.I rolled out a load of dual core Atom boxes for office use between 2010-2011.
Yeah dual core Atoms. Quite pathetic in comparison to Trinity but no complaints, I regularly ask the staff how they are getting on with them and they all still love them.
Folks here are just a little too autistic to see that not everyone works (well for some here I bet the term work is an alien concept in the truest sense) like they do or sees the world in such benchmark obsessed terms.
Most folks have been sorted CPU wise for office work since 2005/6. The stuff most of us play with here is for rich kids toys.
zappb - Sunday, November 4, 2012 - link
I just build 3 of these office machines (prices in euros before VAT / sales tax)AMD A6-5400K - 50
Asrock FM2A75M - DGS - 45
Fractal Core 1000 - 30
Intel 330 120 GB ssd - 75
Mushkin 4GB ddr3 -1600- 13
Be quiet pure power L7 300w - 32
Win8 pro oem (w/Start8)a 110
Office 2010 pro 100
Hardware comes to €245, and if I could have sourced the A4-5300, would have knocked another 15 off that. Amd will be pricing the entry level FM2 stuff really agressively in Jan 2013 onwards, so you could probably pick up the A4-5300 for 30 euro.
,
WEI scores are: Processor: 6.3, Memory: 5.9, Graphics: 4.7, Gaming Graphics: 6.3, primary hard disk, 8.1.
Will test power consumption shortly, but just seeing the load on the CPU with excel, word, and chrome with 5 browser windows open, it hovers around 1- 4%, so meaning for these light usage cases, it might be cheaper to run than the intel options (that would be a real turn up for the books).
crimson117 - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
I'm having trouble parsing this sentence...> From my perspective, a storage system the RAID 5 that the A85X chipset supports across the eight SATA 6 Gbps ports is golden where Trinity is concerned.
KineticHummus - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
it means using trinity in a storage system/home server is great because it natively supports raid 5 across all 8 sata3 ports, which intel can not do.Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
Except that anyone running an 8-drive RAID5 with large, slow, consumer off the shelf SATA drives is either uninformed or a moron.Odds on getting an unrecoverable read error with large (1TB+) drives during a RAID5 rebuild are incredibly high; that's why enterprise SANs are using things like 450GB/600GB SAS drives now, and those have a failure rate an order of magnitude lower than consumer grade SATA.
Home servers should be using RAID1, 10, Z, Z2 - or just none at all. Whatever you use, doing proper backups (which RAID is not) is critical if you care about your data. DVDs I've ripped? I can get those again. Pictures of my son's first birthday? Backed up in triplicate, multiple offsite, and cloud stored.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops...
ven1ger - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
First of if you're calling someone a moron, maybe you should look in the mirror.The article that you linked was written back in 2007, and if you read some of the comments, many of the comments thought it was much ado about nothing.
Maybe you should check out what current cloud based backup companies look like, here's an example that I was just reading about a couple of days ago.
http://blog.backblaze.com/
Very interesting story, commercial cloud based storage company that uses consumer SATA drives. They even have open-sourced hardware design(s) available for their PODs that anyone can use to create their own muti-drive backup system, and which several others have created, if you are so inclined that way.
I am no way involved with Backblaze, just was an interesting story piece that I ran across and their tale of harvesting consumer grade 3TB SATA drives in the aftermath of the Thailand flooding.
Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
Ad hominem ignored.The article was correct then and even more now. As data density has increased, reliability has not kept pace.
Using BackBlaze, or most any "cloud backup provider" as a reference for pro-RAID-5 is a bad idea. Cloud storage providers create their redundancy at the system level. Reliability, availability, and operational efficiencies are all hugely increased by treating the entire system as an FRU. It's cheaper for them to just wait for there to be enough downed pods to justify "Okay, let's roll into the DC, pull out a dozen systems, and slap in new ones." They don't have the time or concern to troubleshoot individual drive failures.
(Also, BackBlaze uses RAID-6.)
So again, if you're using RAID-5 with big, slow, error-prone drives; please stop doing that if you care about your data.
Memristor - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
What version of the AHCI, RAID and USB 3.0 BIOS is on this new board? It would be very helpful if you could include the version of these BIOS's in your board reviews. Since it is very easy to updated the firmware of these components outside of a regular motherboard BIOS update it can be very helpful to increase performance and other issues that arise especially with RAID configurations and newer SSD drives.djshortsleeve - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Ian, glad you mentioned hysteresis. I dont understand why they dont incorporate this control? Its fairly simple as long as a target temperature is defined.goinginstyle - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
"This could be an error on the part of OCCT.." If you do not know what the problem is then why mention it in the review as a performance concern. Either OCCT is updated to work with Trinity or more than likely it is not but find out before you state it. As to DPC latency, is it really a EFI problem or a platform problem as Llano is not much better.Hardcore69 - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Why bother? An Ivy Bridge i3 is 55w and is close to the equivalent except for the GPU, less than a fart's difference CPU wise. Compared to a hot 100w CPU, if you don't game, this isn't worth bothering with. At all for a standard office box. As for the mobo, I'd prefer a gruntier CPU than fancy useless heatpipes.just4U - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Have you used ivy bridge or even set up any? Those puppies get quite warm and temperatures are all over the place. Hell I opted for a 2700K just because of that and prices were comparable. Using the 5800 (been working with it a few days now) it runs cool rarely going over 35C and usually staying in the low 20s in my 10 year old lian-li case (/w 3 80mm fans.. doesn't support bigger ones)CeriseCogburn - Saturday, October 13, 2012 - link
amd fanboy fails again. It's getting irritating with your idiocy and lies and pretense as if you know something. You know exactly nothing." In case of single-threaded load processors with different microarchitectures demonstrate dramatically different levels of power consumption. And here we have every right to state that Ivy Bridge microarchitecture is the most energy-efficient among all testing participants. Core i3 manufactured with 22 nm process do win the promised 8-10 W of power from their predecessors and demonstrate overwhelming advantage over the competitor’s offerings. "
No doubt that Core i3 processors from the new 3000 series will make the most energy-efficient systems. Their power consumption and therefore heat dissipation are significantly lower than by all other platforms, and their advantages over the systems with dual-core Sandy Bridge processors is between 10 and 20 W. This makes Core i3 with Ivy Bridge microarchitecture a perfect choice for compact and energy-efficient systems. And, by the way, for these particular systems Intel has special energy-efficient Core i3 CPU modifications with 35 W TDP instead of 55 W.
LOL - the amd fanboy spews his lies, and gets owned, again, after insulting the poster WHO IS CORRECT.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-...
aryonoco - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
At a few points in the article, Ian mentions that the chipset supports RAID5 and might therefore be a good candidate for a SOHO NAS system. My question is, does anyone who builds a SOHO NAS system actually use these integrated hardware RAIDs?Sure, nothing beats a good and proper RAID controller, but those cost upward of $300 and from experience, these integrated RAID controllers barely perform well. They are generally much slower than software RAID, and tougher to recover from failures. Nearly everyone I know who has built their own NAS goes for software RAID, and any modern OS has better software RAID than these chipsets generally provide.
The other reason not to consider Trinity for a NAS build is that power consumption is generally a major factor in a device that's 24/7 on, and Ivy Bridge beats Trinity in that regards hands down. Also, Trinity's main advantage over Ivi Bridge, that of a better GPU, is of no use in a NAS.
So, I ask again, is Trinity actually such a good choice for a NAS build? I see a place for it in a HTPC build, but pretty much in nothing else.
zappb - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Trinity has a lower idle power consumption - depending on the usage scenario, it should be cheaper to run than the ivy bridge in a NASsolarisking - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Are you guys still working on an iPhone 5 review? It's been weeks!!!Zink - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
If they still don't have that done, how are they going to keep up with all of the Windows releases set to hit in 2 weeks? Flagship Windows phones and tablets probably deserve just as much attention as the iPhone and there are releases covering the whole value spectrum. I hope the iPad Mini doesn't get some 20 page review while windows tablets get the standard windows laptop type review.Snotling - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
There won't be an iPad mini... Unless Apple has lost its sense of direction. (which all things considered might be the case)Phiro69 - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Ian mentions a few times the motherboard - at $140 - appears overpriced for the performance & such. And yes, this Trinity sku is only somewhat comparable to an i3. But isn't the point of Trinity + FM2 to be somewhat future-insulated? As in, drop in another FM2 sku 6-12 months from now and watch your CPU & GPU performance skyrocket? Didn't AMD say FM2 is going to be around for the this gen and the next gen of processors?You might still have to be abit of an AMD fan boy to buy this combo now, but it would make a solid work PC and/or light gaming PC and a year from now, I bet $125 would drop in a huge boost in performance, without having to replace the rest of your system.
Urizane - Monday, October 15, 2012 - link
"But isn't the point of Trinity + FM2 to be somewhat future-insulated?"This depends on whether FM2 fades as quickly as FM1 and the length of time implied by 'somewhat'. Perhaps FM1 was around for 'somewhat' of a long time...maybe.
Mugur - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
HTPC - checked.Cheap file-server (8 x SATA 3 ports is great - I wonder whether mATX boards will have all 8) - checked.
Home Office / light gaming - checked.
Mugur - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
File server - unchecked. Can't seem to find any board with 8 SATA, all are 7 + 1 eSATA... :-(Medallish - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
You make it sound A85X boards are somehow below average when it comes to number of ports, 7 ports is more than any Z77 or A75 based boards, if you have a fileserver that needs all 8 ports, then I'd suggest you buy a dedicated Sata controller for better performance anyway.Medallish - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
Also, Gigabyte boards with A85X doesn't have E-sata and therefore has all 8 Sata ports available.Mugur - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
Gigabyte has 2 A85x boards. UP4 has 7 + 1. Only D3H has 8 and I haven't seen it in stock in my country... But this means there is hope.I have now an Asus with 850SB with 6 SATA 3 + PCIe card with 2 more. Unfortunately I haven't seen any mATX with 8 SATA so far.
hechacker1 - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
But it's so easy to get a cheap sata card without RAID support and just use software raid (freenas comes to mind).Why deal with buggy controllers anyway. Modern software raid is easily configurable and very fault tolerant, and you can even do things like SSD caching at the front end.
I do intend to build a NAS / server, and it's either Trinity or an i3.
Mugur - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
I will try with Windows Server 2012 and Storage Spaces myself. I need Windows for my server at home. Hopefully it can make a logical drive with parity from different types of physical drives... or I got it all wrong. :-)cjs150 - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
HTPC - uncheckedTDP is way too high. That means significant active cooling, that means noise.
Do not mind having one slow fan in an HTPC but not more.
AMd need to have a sub 45W part on an FM2 board for it to be good for an HTPC. Do that at reasonable cost and AMD would clean up as nearest equivalent for intel is the i7-3770T which is expensive
Medallish - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
HTPC - RecheckedTDP is acceptable on both A10, 5700 and 5800 65W and even 100W can be cooled passively with the right HTPC case(Streacom FC5-OD). You can also buy a Jetway Mini ITX FS1r2 board that will work with A10-4600(35W TDP). If Mobile sockets is too exotic for you, it should take no time to adjust the A10 of any kind really, ,to run a 3GHz and get the tdp below 45W, but eally since when was 65W too much for one slow fan?
The Streacom case is btw. confirmed, I'm using it to cool down my current A8-3870k, works perfectly.
cjs150 - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
Streamcom FC5 specs are for a maximum of 65W TDP so 100W is outside of their envelope. 65W TDP will work fine, just as long as the room is not too warm. So I guess your A8-3870 is either under-clocked or currently in the fridge!!For an HTPC, it needs to play HD material smoothly, rip HD content quickly and I assume play some games at reasonable speed but nothing too taxing.
i7-3770T is way over-powered (and expensive) for that - and not as cool as it should be because intel use poor thermal paste on the IHS. AMD should therefore clean up this market. I prefer to have a CPU that is under the case thermal envelope to allow for margin for error.
So if it works for you (and I really like the Streamcom case) great, but for me AMD need to get a 22 nm part out with a much lower thermal envelope
butdoesitwork - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
1. Normally when a reviewer sees something anomalous he contacts the manufacturer prior to posting the review. Has there been any follow up with ASUS on the DPC latency spikes? Is a BIOS fix actually forthcoming? It's really hard to just leave it at "this would be slightly worrying for audio work"!2. The USB and SATA charts are nearly pointless. You're comparing a new AMD chipset against umpteen Intel motherboards. That's reasonable, but how does this new A85X chipset fare against older AMD 9xx chipsets? Is this new chipset an improvement? And if it isn't better, do they have an explanation why? And wouldn't that be another thing to ask ASUS about?
3. Speaking of older chipsets, why does the Sabretooth only make a cameo?
The X264 graphs are just silly! I thought we wanted a comparison between Thuban and Llano here, not just umpteen Core i7s! You did say "For AMD, this means we can compare the new Piledriver modules to Llano with its Stars cores, Phenom II and Thuban, and Zambezi with Bulldozer."
4. With all these gobbledygook-named motherboards floating around, it sure would be nice if the "gaming benchmarks" graphs also denoted which (admittedly also gobbledygook-named) CPU was paired with each one. Like the "computation benchmarks" did. It would simplify validating statements like "Portal 2 seems to enjoy the GPU power, and CPU power does not matter as much.".
5. On Dirt 3 "In the case of Trinity, the lack of grunt by the CPU does give it a lower result than the rest of our testing."
Be that as it may, where does it stand compared with the Core i3? Thuban? Llano?
Trinity isn't even meant to (and certainly can't) compete with Core i7, so why are these graphs so dominated by them? I wouldn't expect radical fluctuations between the Intel chipset boards. Are you looking for motherboard-influenced performance quirks? If so, shouldn't you also be comparing multiple A85X motherboards?
6. Above ALL else, this is a new chipset. Accordingly, have you done any stability and reliability testing? Speed is nice, but what good is it if the new fangled SATA3 and USB3 ports exhibit device compatibility issues or data corruption? (Have you done a "diff" of your files in Linux? Or noted any bus reset errors in Linux logfiles? You know...the kinds of things Windows never tells you?)
IanCutress - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
1) Interestingly enough it is not a reviewers job to debug. I do correlate my results to the manufacturers, but I test on the latest publicly available BIOS at the time of testing. If I sat around waiting for 'the next BIOS' then each review would take 3x as long and I couldn't feed my family. Sorry to disappoint. (Also, not all reviewers are masculine as per your pronoun usage.)2) The USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gbps are both native on Intel and AMD unless specified otherwise. I believe it is an appropriate comparison. People deciding to upgrade will want a comparison between what is available now in the market, not what was on the market. There is scope for editorials to look at how certain dynamics have changed over the years, but also tests change. My old data for 9xx chipsets is not relevant here.
3) Again, tests change over time in order to correlate with newer hardware and test the capabilities. If you have the spare time to dig out the hardware and run the newer tests, that's up to you. The other 14 motherboards I have in needed to be tested get priority here otherwise they become irrelevant. I would love to have infinite hardware and infinite time to do the comparisons, but that is not a logistical possibility.
4) Each chipset is tested against a single CPU. P67/Z68 was i5-2500K, X79 was i7-3960X, FM1 was A6-3650, FM2 was A10-5800K.
5) My apologies, next time I'll forgo the initial release review because it's the only board in my hand before release and wait a few months until I have six reviewed then post them at once when they become a little irrelevant.
6) Have you? Have you got time to do stability testing? What about testing it at high altitude, or in the Sahara?
If you believe there are things missing from the review, helpfully suggest additions for future consideration. My email is through my name on the review.
brookheather - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
Typo - "there is few reasons to jump on board to Trinity".Mugur - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
Well, she was hot back in the first Matrix days... :-)silverblue - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
"With that being said, it is clear that video conversion is an INT process and all four of the A10-5800K INT units are being used"Are they, though? If so, it's a bit disappointing. Are all four threads maxed out in Task Manager? It'd be interesting to see a 4C/4T Intel processor thrown in there (2500K seems a perfect candidate) as well.
From looking at this, it should mean that an identically clocked Piledriver (83xx) CPU wouldn't be too far behind the 3770K in this one test. It does also mean, unfortunately, that even with linear performance scaling, even the top Piledriver CPU won't dethrone Thuban in the 3DPM MP test.
Soulnibbler - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
What does is this line in the performance section supposed to mean?QUOTE:
From a practical standpoint, the lack of floating point units in the CPU gives cause for concern as not everyone codes in hex or integer style (my own personal software all uses FP – INT would be confusing to code for me for negligible gain on most architectures).
/QUOTE:
I'm assuming you are referring to the bulldozer/steamroller architecture with a shared FPU unit per pair of integer units. On first reading it implies (and this implication is uncontested by the bizarre contents of of the following parentheses) that there is no floating point unit on the chip. That is patently wrong as there is a rather nice FPU shared between every two integer cores.
The other interpretation is that you think it needs MORE than half an FPU per core. That is an arguable point, but then the strange text in the parentheses paints you as someone who needs much more study towards what actually happens in a program. So much of your normal computing occurs in integer space. There isn't really any sort of program I can easily think of where you don't use integer operations (even memory mapping is integer) many times in order to prepare to do a single FP operation. The counter examples are all pretty much graphics examples where we want to work on vectors. The Trinity FPU has a nice vector processor too. If you break down and look at the machine code that any of your programs use you will find that an overwhelming (much greater than 66%) of that code is integer code.
Crying OH NOES 1/2 A FPU, is not good reporting. YES the AMD chips lag the Intel chips, YES the design parameters are different. The unfounded supposition that performance difference are due to that specific portion of the architectural choice is frankly bad journalism. If you want to make claims like that you have to point to a set of benchmarks that demonstrate clearly that the 1/2 FPUs are to blame. I doubt this is the case as most analysis that I've seen points to larger memory subsystem problems as a much bigger factor.
IanCutress - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
If your supposition is true, then the A10-5800K should not experienced as much of a decrease against the competition as it did do in the results.My 3DPM results clear my position on the matter:
"In the single threaded test, a lot of conclusions can be drawn from the comparison of AMD architectures. Direct comparison of Piledriver to Bulldozer (A10-5800K to FX-8150) gives a boost in single core performance of 7%, however comparing the old Stars cores of the A8-3850 at 2.9 GHz is roughly the same as the new Piledriver core at 4.2 GHz. So even with a 1.3 GHz advantage, Piledriver is only as good as Stars and less efficient in floating point results. If we compare Piledriver to Thuban, i.e. A10-5800K to X6 1100T, the Piledriver core gets stomped on by a good 25% performance. I find this quite staggering – most of the code I ever encountered as a computational chemist was floating point based, dealing with single and double precision on a regular basis. On this result, I would steer clear of Piledriver.
The multithreaded version of 3DPM is slightly tougher to analyze. Due to the FP nature of the program, the A10-5800K is essentially a 2 core FPU processor, whereas all the other comparative AMD processors have either 4 or 6 FPUs to play with. What is perhaps worth considering is that the Bulldozer processor with 4 modules scores 326.32, whereas the Piledriver processor with only 2 modules scores 203.06, which is more than half. This would mean that the Piledriver core actually achieves 20% better performance at the same frequency, despite our ST test giving Piledriver only a 7% increase. Part of this could be put down to the architecture improvements – improved scheduling for heavily threaded loads, one of the downfalls of Bulldozer but was improved in Piledriver could be the reason here."
My basis for my comments is from a computational complexity standpoint. Sure memory mapping may be an int process, but if I only do it at the beginning and end of a matrix transformation (and thereby having a total processing time less than 0.1% of the program) then it becomes insignificant.
What AMD have done is project that applications in the future which require heavy computational throughput will be driven by INT ops. The big software vendors can do this, making video conversion and ray tracing type applications enhanced by use of INT ops. But for the non-CompSci scientist who relies more on readable code but also wants a speed increase, then going all out on the INT side may not be possible, and we get limited performance due to the scheduling and the lack of pure grunt due to the gutted APU. It's a design choice AMD have to live with, and I'm not the only one who is not entirely in favor of it.
Scootiep7 - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
Ok, I'm trying not to break down and just buy a Llano for my HTPC build, but does anybody know how much longer it'll be till I can get some nice options for a mini-ITX such as http://news.softpedia.com/news/MSI-Presents-FM2-A7... and the 5700k? What's the holdup on these!groundhogdaze - Thursday, October 11, 2012 - link
AMD should play to their strengths which is an affordable CPU with a relatively fast integrated GPU. That means focusing a small form factor systems such as AIO, ITX, HTPC class systems, however, I am surprised and disappointed at the relative lack of options when it comes to ITX FMx motherboards. I sold my AMD stock when I concluded they had their strategy wrong. Most folks who want to use a full sized case would also want to use a dedicated GPU, otherwise, what's the point of having a full sized case? Wrong marketing choice.Unless AMD can improve their heat/power ratings, the Intel G530 makes better sense as a NAS solution as it is dirt cheap and uses less power than its advertised 65w TDP while running circles around the Atom class processors. I hope AMD is reading the forums and best luck to them.
Mugur - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
You are right. Full ATX and Trinity makes little sense. mATX and mini ITX with 8 SATA3 and integrated graphics should be the focus. Full ATX in fact makes little sense today, anyway... :-)If you want more than a NAS from a server, the best 65W Trinity part should be nice. I have a Phenom II X2 rated 80W in my HTPC and an Athlon II X4 (95W) in my server at home. Neither of them comes even closer to their rated TDP, according to the "green" ICs and software of the motherboards (Gigabyte and Asus).
silverblue - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
AMD seems to volt their processors conservatively, so K10Stat (or other utilities) or using the BIOS to reduce the voltage may prove useful in reducing power consumption noticably without affecting performance more than a couple of percent.Toms ran an article on this as regards Trinity, and have done so with various AMD models in the past:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-5800k-trin...
Saving 14W for a tiny performance deficit is more than acceptable in my eyes.
I undervolted my Phenom II X3 710 as per the following article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-powe...
(though I needed to raise voltages by 0.025v to keep it 100% stable in my case)
cjs150 - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
Except for the complete power users I am not sure full ATX makes sense for the vast majority of people no matter what CPU you use.mAtx has room for 4 PCI-E/PCI slots. even if the GPU takes up 2 slots what do people use the rest for? Sound card, TV tuner then what? [If any one says RAID card - why do you need a discrete GPU for what is effectively a NAS]
Having just built an HTPC using a mini-ITX board it is remarkable what power you can have on tap with just one PCI-E slot
groundhogdaze - Saturday, October 13, 2012 - link
Yea, full ATX is making less and less sense these days. My main system is full sized but most of the systems I own are ITX or smaller. I just slapped together a HTPC using a Cooler Elite120 ITX case, an old GTX-560ti video card,16gb of RAM and an i3-2100 CPU so it double duties as a Home Gaming Theater as well. It is awesome how much power one can squeeze into a small system these days.vkristof - Saturday, October 13, 2012 - link
I'd have some interest in the AMD combo if it could drive 3 displays.If it can, what are the limitations?
Teknobug - Monday, October 15, 2012 - link
Looks like I'm going with the i5 3570K and P8Z77 board combo this time around and I've been a long time AMD user since the late 90's, I was highly interested in the A10 5800K but the benchmarks look ridiculous, especially the gaming benchmarks.Shadowmaster625 - Monday, October 15, 2012 - link
"On AMD the results are better, making the GPU the limiting factor." Please find this sentence in your article and review it for possible errors. After all, how can anything be better on AMD? lol. Seriously I think you meant intel.markcomp - Sunday, March 24, 2013 - link
OK, a lot of this is right on the edge of my understanding, and as I was about to put together another PC for my kids, the intro on board specs, chipset etc has just got me a bit confused.I was not looking at a Trinity as the budget won't stretch that far, but had come up with the following (actually the boys 13 and 15 did most of the research):
Will they work well together, and is there a better combination for the price (or less).
Sadly over here in The UK, we can’t get the deals like you folks across the big pond and this lot comes to £450 ($685):
Processor £100
Mobo and graphics card £150 each approximately
AMD Piledriver FX-6 Six Core 6300 Black Edition 3.50GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor
Asus Sabertooth 990FX AMD 990FX (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard
(how is this different from the R2.0 version)
One of the following:
Sapphire HD 7850 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
Sapphire HD 7850 OC Edition 2GB Dual DVI HDMI DisplayPort PCI-E Graphics Card
Asus HD 7850 DirectCU II V2 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
In retrospect, this should perhaps be a forum post, but having got this far....
Thanks anyway - what a good site, glad I found it