Testing Different Memory Speeds on AMD's A8-3850 Llano APU

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

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Bitfenix USB 3.0 connectors pass GIGABYTE motherboard compatibility testing

Modern motherboards can have up to 2 onboard USB 3.0 headers, but not every mobo ships with front USB 3.0 connector cables. What do you do if your case doesn’t support enough front panel USB 3.0 connectors?

I’m facing this problem at the moment with my newest PC build where my new case only has 1 onboard header for USB 3.0 (for 2 front USB 3.0 ports). This means that the other 2 front USB 3.0 ports are wasted! What’s more is that my PC sits snugly under my desk in my cubicle at work, so it is not practical for me to always get on my hands and knees to access the USB 3.0 ports in the back I/O panel, so I want to have the maximum number of convenient front panel USB ports.

Bitfenix just sent us two solutions to this problem in the form of the BFA-U3-KU3IU3-RP Internal USB 3.0 Adapter and the BFA-U3-K435-RP USB 3.0 Front Panel. They both just passed GIGABYTE motherboard compatibility testing and we have added them to our USB 3.0 microsite. Here they are (they are hyperlinked so just click on them to have a look at the Bitfenix product web page):

 

I especially like the front panel connector because it has 4 USB 3.0 ports with a decent distance between them so that you can use multiple bulky USB devices at the same time.

Check out our USB 3.0 microsite for more USB 3.0 devices that have passed GIGABYTE motherboard compatibility testing.

A Chinese version of this blog article can be found here.

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Total War: Shogun 2 DirectX 11 Performance Testing

Legit Editorial Reviews

Total War: Shogun 2 DirectX 11 The Update

A little more than a month ago you might remember that we took a very close look at Sega's newest game title, Total War: Shogun 2. At the time of our article the game was only able to run on DirectX 9 with the promise that there would soon be a patch that would allow all of us to play the game in all the graphics splendor of DirectX 11. Well my friends, that time has come. Earlier this month a patch was released that not only added the ability to use DirectX 11, but it also added several benchmarks that are built right into the Steam interface for the game. All you have to do is right click on the Shogun 2 game link in you Steam library and the benchmarks are listed in the drop down menu. But we can talk more about that later.

Above you can see a screen shot of the updated settings screen. One of the other items that was mentioned as being included in the patch was the ability to adjust the AA settings in the game. A quick look at the screen above clearly shows its addition. One of the additions that I found rather cool was the ability to choose between DirectX 9 and Direct X 11 in the settings menu. So I guess you are probably asking yourself, "What the hell is the point of all of this?" Well, much like we did in the first article, we have taken the new found DirectX capability and benchmarked it to see how it would perform in-game with these more intense settings.

This time we used the Asus Radeon HD 6870 Video Card; as you will remember, last time we used a Sapphire Radeon 6850 Toxic Edition Video Card for our tests. We ran all of the exact same tests as we did in the previous article, but I also went one step further and ran all of the in-game benchmarks as well to see how those would run and to see if they would be a good candidate for future video card reviews. All right, enough about all of this stuff you aren't going to read anyway. Let's get to the benchmarks.

Next Page - Total War: Shogun 2 DirectX 11 The Difference

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Testing AMD Catalyst 11.4 pre-release on Linux hybrid graphics

A new version of the Catalyst binary driver has been pre-released:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTI3Mg

This is AMD's closed-source binary driver, nothing to do with vga_switcheroo.

One of the team members has submitted a bug report here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer/+bug/745955

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