AMD A4 7300 good enough for a "dad PC"?

[Matt_SC_BR]

My dad asked me to build him a simple PC, for his e-mails, youtube and netflix. So i wanna find what is the cheapest build i can find while still not being a shitty PC. I want it to run smooth even on youtube on netflix, on 1366x768 resolution.

So, will the A4 7300 get the job done? i will side it with 8gb of ram on dual channel (already had the sticks) and a simple SSD. Opinions?

 

[NubUser]

yes, but you can also use the Amd Athlon 5150, that is AM1 its cheaper and use a lot less power and its quadcore instead of dual core

 

[Hawkshot]

Yeah that would be absolutely fine, you could also use an Intel Duo or a Pentium if you wanted too both achieve the same thing.

 

[clemre]

NubUser is actually right, for simple PC Athlon 5150 or 5350 are the most cost effective solutions, yet, unlike older systems (Core Duo) have all the new features like usb 3.0, sata 6 etc. More than that, they have Radeon R3 graphics on board, on which you can actually run some older games. And all of this in 40W package, which is almost completely silent even under load. I've chosen a similar laptop (AMD Beema) for my mother. With an SSD and everthing runs really fine, she's quite happy, it's a perfect machine for office task and web browsing.

 

[Matt_SC_BR]

NubUser is actually right, for simple PC Athlon 5150 or 5350 are the most cost effective solutions.

Oh that is very good to hear. I found a 5350 for sale really cheap, but how does it compare to the A4 7300? It's faster or slower?

 

[clemre]

There's no simple answer. In PassMark Athlon 5350 gets better general score than A4 7300 (2566 points to 2200) but single threaded performance is around 40% better in the A4. The general score reflects the day to day performance with standard office tasks and web browsing, the single trheaded performance is more important in games and some more demanding applications (like Photoshop). Yet Athlon sports full 4 cores and can work with 4 threads at once, which helps a lot while browsing the net, and A4 7300 has only one core with two modules and can work on two threads at once. I'd say for daily use (office and web) 4 full cores of the Athlon 5350 will do better than 2 modules of A4 7300, but if your dad wants to play games, work with, say, AutoCAD or Photoshop, then A4 will be the better choice. In regard to video experience, both cpus give you perfect fullHD playback with video enhancement enabled:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_athlon_5350_apu_and_am1_platform_review,16.html

 

[Matt_SC_BR]

Thanks man! i'll go with the 5350 then, fits my dad profile better, and it's cheaper.

 

[NubUser]

the 5350 is 25w

 

[clemre]

@NubUser - yep, you're right, my mistake, but that's even better.