AMD Athlon 5350 And AM1 Platform Review: Kabini In A Socket

[EricJohn2004]

Yes, I was about right, the FX4300 scores a 3.13 and an i3 3225 scores a 3.25. So PS4's CPU is a little faster than FX4300 and a tad slower than i3 3225.

Personally, I thought this CPU would be a LOT slower. Like maybe it would score a 1.5 in Cinebench 11.5. Since everyone said it was a low power tablet CPU. Turns out that that's far from the truth.

And being that you get a GPU that has the same amount of cores and memory bandwidth as a GTX760. I'd say the PS4 is a damn good deal at only 399$.

Of course I own a top of the line PC too with an i5 3570k@4.7Ghz and a GTX780@1200Mhz with a 500GB SSD and a 27 inch 1920x1080 IPS screen. And that's awesome and all. I just prefer to play single player games like Tomb Raider, and Infamous Second Son on my couch where it's not as competitive, and I play multiplayer games like BF4 and World of Tanks on my PC, where it's a lot more competitive.

I'm just glad that the PS4 has powerful enough hardware to at least end up matching mid/high end GTX760 as devs get used to it's power. Because on PC a GTX760 almost max's out every game at 1080p 60FPS. So there's no reason a PS4 shouldn't be able to do it.

 

[Onus]

There are some people who bought E-350 or E-450 machines and were disappointed by their performance. This is the chip it looks like they needed. Still weak, but perhaps enough. I too would like to see some tests with a discrete GPU. Maybe no one would buy them together, but how many of us who got a chance to test one of these wouldn't pull an old HD4850 or HD7750 out of the parts box?
Did you test the 19V input? That is HUGE, making this perfect for a kid's entertainment machine on the road (someone just needs to sell the monitor for it...hint hint...).

 

[Kai Dowin]

Celeron G1820 for US$42~. End of story.
Oh, but despite having several times the performance of this Athlon part, it's power comsuption is 25W more. The Green Party gotta be mad at this.

 

[xiinc37]

Last sentence of second paragraph: "Gone is the VLIW-based design prevalent in Radeon HD 6000-and-newer GPUs, replaced by Graphics Core Next." Shouldn't that be 6000-and-older?

 

[rwinches]

@Cleeve
Slide Adobe Photoshop CC
Lower is better.

 

[rwinches]

Tom's Thanks for fixing the Comments

However if one is on a page other than the first you cannot display all the comments it is truncated. (Of course if there is only a few comments you won't observe this.)

 

[FuzzyIce]

ieman26, if by a download only machine you mean something to hook to the router for download stuff from the Internet, this would be a very good choice. I just saw an ad offering a mini ITX motherboard with 4 SATA 6Gbps and the Sempron plus a mini atx case for $99. You can easily put together a small footprint PC with up to 4 sata hds and download anything you want. You can make it a Linux machine, for the sake of being protected from virus and malware, and you could run it headless, and use another PC in your network to remote login there and schedule all the downloads for you. Hope this helps.

 

[EdgeT]

They look like great little platforms. But a whole lot of people go the AMD route for homeservers (myself included). And just like me, a lot of people think that 4 SATA ports are just not enough. If it had like 8, like a lot of AMD motherboards I've looked at, I'd buy it in a heartbeat, and I bet a lot of people would.

It's just convenience and cost efficiency, really, on the one hand, you've got 1 motherboard, CPU, tower, PSU, OS and IP adress for remote control and 8 HDDs and on the other, you've still got 8 HDDS, but 2 of everything else. Power consumption wouldn't make THAT much of a difference, since storage servers mostly idle, but the noise and size do take their toll.

 

[ojas]

I wish you'd throw in a discrete graphics card as well and compare, just as an academic exercise.

 

[lp231]

Quad core Celerons, interesting. Basically Intel can release whatever CPU they want if they felt like it, like a unlock Haswell Pentium.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-haswell-e-devils-canyon-pentium-anniversary-edition-broadwell,26326.html
If they can do that, they should also release some 6 cores for the current Haswell 1150.

 

[Jaroslav Jandek]

Gotta love that 850W PSU for testing of 30W parts - the true meaning of overkill . I would like to see them tested with those mini PSUs too (even though the difference should be negligible).

Also, there is an error in Productivity Benchmarks - Photoshop encoding graph: "higher is better" should be "lower is better".

Why is there no pricing on Intel CPUs on page 1?

I am actually planning to buy a mini-PC, so I looked the prices up. Most "mainstream" shops have them more expensive, though... like newegg has A5350 for $65:
GA-AM1M-S2H ($42) + Athlon 5350 AM1 R3 ($60) = $102.
I can get Asrock Q1900B-ITX J1900 MITX for $84.

I am probably going to wait a bit and buy a 14nm NUC next year, since I don't really need that mini PC (the room I am placing it in isn't finished anyway).

 

[Drejeck]

ooh i love tiny multithreaded chip. it can indeed be the best mail server for enterprises that doesn't rape your wallet and keeps the IO high

 

[killerclick]

Oh, AMD I'm done with you. I finally bought my first Intel CPU since Celeron 300A and I probably won't be buying any more desktop CPUs ever.

 

[Zepid]

I wish they would report on how well these things decode 1080p 10bit video while outputting 5.1 surround. I want one of these two setups for a low-power media center/set-top box.

 

[ingtar33]

so in essense if you're ever in the NUC or Bay Trail Market for a micro/quasi pc, avoid intel like the plague.

nothing new here. Baytrail/NUC has been chasing ARM power consumption, not desktop performance... that said it's nice to see someone is chasing the performance crown in that space.

 

[crisan_tiberiu]

I want FM2+ Kaveri Athlons. PLS AMD , dont get me wrong, my Athlon750k is decent, but could be better )

 

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Would have been nice if there were some older CPUs included to compare to, like Athlon 64 x2, first gen Phenom X4, and Conroe Core 2 Duo. It'd be even better if said older CPUs were around 2.0-2.5GHz as well.

 

[Daniel Bayes]

The power testing is completely wrong here for a few reasons:

1) No one in their right mind will run an AM1 or Celeron CPU on an 850W PSU.
2) The efficiency of PSUs drops significantly at low (under 10%) utilization.
3) PSUs have a small overhead when running, which is significant at extremely low wattages.
4) 80+ certification says absolutely nothing about running at around 5-7% of the maximum PSU output - even with platinum certification, at those percentages it is usually far less than 70% efficiency.

A far better test would be a 70-100W PSU, which would give a result that is both far more accurate and in this case, crucially important when you cite it as a reason to give AMD such an edge in recommendation.

 

[compdoc]

I've been building routers with kabini for a couple of months now thanks to ECS KBN-I boards. And now I have more choices. These systems are great for running pfSense or Ubuntu, support qemu-kvm, and they run Windows 8.1 very quickly. AES support gives them an edge. Would make great NAS boxes. Their cpu cache (L1, L2) speeds are faster than the AM2 line of cpus, but that are less expensive and less energy used. Great job AMD!

 

[Isaiah4110]

Sounds like these APUs would be able to handle streaming videos and playing movies well without adding a dedicated GPU... Is AMD possibly trying to target/corner the HTPC market with this line?

 

[compdoc]

I think the speed race was won by Intel, but the high end market is limited compared to the huge markets opening in China and Africa, and places where people are being able to afford a computer for the first time in their lives. 3rd World countries will be comparing these low cost apu and atom systems to ARM and Qualcomm and Raspberry Pi. And sure, they are perfect for HTPC. Along routers and mini-servers, that should be a decent size market as well.

 

[JimmiGilbi]

Interesting, I wonder what board I can buy for-
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113364

 

[jlwtech]

When bulldozer came out, I thought that might be the beginning of the end, for AMD.
It's really nice to see AMD putting up some stiff competition. Nobody wants to see a monopoly.

 

[ferooxidan]

what i need is intel haswell processor + gtx 750 ti combine on a single SoC with TDP not more than 100W then i am set.

 

[logainofhades]

what i need is intel haswell processor + gtx 750 ti combine on a single SoC with TDP not more than 100W then i am set.

An i3 4130 and 750ti is pretty close at 114w.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i3-4130 3.4GHz Dual-Core Processor ($118.93 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: Asus GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Video Card ($149.99 @ NCIX US)
Total: $268.92
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-04-09 21:19 EDT-0400)