Do I have to disable the APU in the bios if I don't want to use it?

[Jay Santos]

I bought an AMD Sempron 2650 for $9 and an MSI AM1i board for $10 after MIR.
I know it's quite a weak system but I only need it for a file/media server. For the price of $20 it can't be beat.

The chip has a built in APU. I don't want to use it since I tossed my GTX 960 in there. I'm using the gpu to help offload some of the streaming stress from the cpu. I want to squeeze out as much power from the cpu. I figure if I can take the resource meant for the apu to be solely used for cpu purposes, I may get a bit more power.

Do I have to turn off anything on the motherboard or is it automatic by not using the onboard gpu?

 

[10tacle]

Honestly, I am not familiar with older AMD chipsets. However, in most newer generation chipsets by both AMD and Intel, if you put a dedicated GPU in there and the BIOS setting is on "Auto" for on-board graphics, by default it will be disabled. The only time anyone would really ever want to run both on board and dedicated graphics is to run multiple monitors, one plugged into the GPU and one plugged into the motherboard.

 

[TechyInAZ]

You can disable the APU's graphics in the BIOS. However, you might want to leave it on since I've heard the GPUs in those APUs are capable of doing some CPU type workloads.