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Legit Processor Reviews

Memory Performance on AMD's A-Series APU

Last month Legit Reviews reviewed the AMD A8-3850 'Llano' APU and our article looks like it was well received by our readers with the exception of one thing. We've had a number of readers write in saying that it was great that we tested this platform with 1866MHz memory, but they are building budget systems and want to use 1333MHz or 1600MHz memory. It is true that we didn't look at performance numbers of AMD's A-Series APUs on the A75 chipset at 1333MHz, 1600MHz and since this platform is very budget friendly we see this as a valid point.

Legit Reviews does not want to ostracize any of our readers and pride ourselves on our no-BS straight forward and honest reviews, so we went back to the drawing board to get you the performance data you need before ordering in a new platform. We'll be using the Gigabyte GA-A75-UD4H motherboard for testing again, but since we updated the BIOS to version F3 we re-did all of the performance numbers as we did see improved performance with the new BIOS.

We also got a few questions about how the platform handles 16GB of memory and if there are any stability issues with running all four memory slots fully populated. We've seen performance gains with all the memory slots full on AMD platforms in the past, so we'll be looking at 2x4GB and 4x4GB performance as well in our test results. Not too many people will be running 16GB of memory on the Llano A-Series APU, but we found no issues in doing so with G.Skill Ripjaws

So, to reiterate what our goals are for this article one more time:

Benchmark 2x4GB memory kits at 1333MHz, 1600MHz, 1866MHz to find performance differences

Benchmark 2x4GB versus 4x4GB to see if filling all the memory slots impacts performance

See if we have any issues running 16GB of memory

This should be easy enough, so let's take a look at the test system and get right to the performance numbers.

Next Page - The Test System

TweakTown.com have published an article and video where they have our forthcoming A75M-UD2H motherboard pushing AMD’s latest Llano APU to achieve an incredible P6281 points in 3DMark Vantage (performance mode). TweakTown is claiming this overclock as a world record for an integrated graphics processor, further ramping up the buzz of expectation regarding AMD’s eagerly anticipated Llano APU platform launch later this week. We’ve put a lot of work into making our new Llano-compatible AMD A series boards the ideal base for these new Accelerated Processor Units, or APUs, so of course we’re totally chuffed to see a record-breaking overclock on one of our boards at this early stage.

“You may have seen this type of configuration before, but not like how you are going to see in the video above. We managed to overclock the AMD CPU from its default clock speed of 2.9GHz all the way up to 3.6GHz (150 x 24) using an FSB of 150MHz. In turn this also overclocked the DX11 Radeon HD GPU within the AMD APU from a core clock speed of 600MHz to 900MHz. This is really impressive and we even saw Crysis 2 running at 720p at around 40 - 45 frames per second and from a system without a video card (strange to look at, actually), that is rather good.” – TweakTown