Tom’s Hardware Takes a First Look at AMD Llano for the Desktop

Tom's Hardware recently took a look at the nuts and bolts of AMD’s new Llano platform and came upon some interesting analysis. First off, they gave a shout out to GIGABYTE, noting that our GA-A75M-UD2H features Dual-link DVI and is the only board they had that provided DisplayPort connectivity as well.

Also, GIGABYTE’s board was singled out for its overclock ability:

I spent a couple of late nights chatting back and forth with the fine folks at ASRock and Gigabyte, who helped in near real-time with BIOS builds. Eventually, I was able to get Gigabyte’s A75M-UD2H dialed in at nearly 3.4 GHz (it’d run in excess of that, but crashed under load) using a 23.5x multiplier and 145 MHz reference clock reflected as 143.5 MHz. The APU only needed a .05 V bump to achieve those numbers, too…

Other boards simply wouldn’t overclock well at all, failing long before we were forced to fight a bus speed idiosyncrasy.

They also noted that memory really matters with this platform:

Despite marginal gains in application performance, the bottom line here is simple: if you want to get the best horsepower out of a Llano-based APU, that graphics engine needs to breathe. Memory able to support a high data rate at low latencies is absolutely imperative for the best possible frame rates in games.

Don’t sweat DDR3-1866 if it means CAS 8 or 9 timings. Aggressively-tuned DDR3-1600 looks to be the sweet spot.

Stay tuned to our blog for the next couple of weeks, as we will be doing some testing to show how memory and even overclocking on this entry platform can lead to some great performance and more than just playable DX11 gaming.

To read the full Llano overview on Tom’s, please visit HERE.

Chinese Version of this blog here