AMD A8-3850 Fusion APU review

AMD's first performance Fusion APU

AMD A8-3850 Fusion APU
AMD's performance APU hit home

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In pure CPU performance terms you can see just how much better the AMD A8-3850's four real cores are compared with the Intel Core i3 2100's twin, Hyperthreaded cores.

With the gaming benchmarks it quickly becomes obvious just how much of a benefit the AMD Dual Graphics functionality is compared to the still rather impressive stock speeds.

For the onboard GPU part of the APU to hit 25fps in DiRT 3 at High settings, with 4x Anti Aliasing turned on, is no mean feat.

The Shogun 2 CPU benchmark though shows what hit you are could be taking on the CPU side when you're taking the both the computational and graphics parts of the APU.

At the bottom though the RAM benchmark demonstrates just how much of tangible performance difference there is between different speeds of memory. Previously games wouldn't have benefited from faster RAM.

CPU rendering performance

Cinebench R11.5 – Index: higher is better

AMD A8-3850 @2.9GHz – 3.42
AMD A8-3850 OC @ 3.7GHz – 4.22
Intel Core i3 2100 @ 3.1GHz – 2.96

CPU video encoding performance

X264 – Frames per second: higher is better

AMD A8-3850 @2.9GHz – 19.96
AMD A8-3850 OC @ 3.7GHz – 24.49
Intel Core i3 2100 @ 3.1GHz – 12.76

Memory bandwidth

SiSoft Sandra – GB/s: higher is better

AMD A8-3850 @2.9GHz – 15.36
AMD A8-3850 OC @ 3.7GHz – 15.58
Intel Core i3 2100 @ 3.1GHz – 17.41

DirectX 11 tessellation performance

Heaven 2.5 – Frames per second: higher is better

AMD A8-3850 on board graphics – 4.8
AMD A8-3850 Dual Graphics (HD 6670) – 13.4
AMD A8-3850 Single GPU (HD 6670) – 9.2

DirectX 11 gaming performance

DiRT 3 (Ultra, 4xAA) – Frames per second: higher is better

AMD A8-3850 on board graphics – 13
AMD A8-3850 Dual Graphics (HD 6670) – 31
AMD A8-3850 Single GPU (HD 6670) – 22

DiRT 3 (High, 4x AA) – Frames per second: higher is better

AMD A8-3850 on board graphics – 25
AMD A8-3850 Dual Graphics (HD 6670) – 58
AMD A8-3850 Single GPU (HD 6670) – 43

Shogun 2 (Medium, no AA) – Frames per second: higher is better

AMD A8-3850 on board graphics – 32
AMD A8-3850 Dual Graphics (HD 6670) – 74
AMD A8-3850 Single GPU (HD 6670) – 56

CPU gaming performance

Shogun 2 (CPU test) – Frames per second: higher is better

AMD A8-3850 on board graphics – 19
AMD A8-3850 Dual Graphics (HD 6670) – 15
AMD A8-3850 Single GPU (HD 6670) – 17

RAM gaming performance

Shogun 2 (Medium, no AA) – Frames per second: higher is better

AMD A8-3850 4GB @ 1,333MHz – 29
AMD A8-3850 4GB @ 1,600MHz – 32
AMD A8-3850 4GB @ 1,866MHz - 34