Legit Reviews

AMD A8-3850 2.9GHz Llano APU Review

AMD announced the Fusion A-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) for desktop PCs this morning! This is a significant milestone for AMD as it means that the company has now successfully launched their 'Llano' APU architecture for both mobile and desktop platforms. Read on to see how the AMD A8-3850 performs as we try it out on over a dozen benchmarks against the Intel Core i3-2105 processor!

When it comes to performance the AMD A8-3850 proved to be tough competition for the Intel Core i3-2105 processor, but to be fair both of the processors did well in certain areas and not so much in others. The one area that the AMD A8-3850 APU never lost in was when the Radeon HD 6550D GPU inside took center stage. We even used the Intel Core i3-2105 that features the recently updated Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPU. If you recall the original Core i3-2100 used Intel HD Graphics 2000, but both the Core i3-2100 and Core i3-2105 feature the same 3.1GHz clock speed. Regardless, the Intel HD Graphics doesn't stand a chance to the Radeon HD 6550D in game performance.

Article Title: AMD A8-3850 2.9GHz Llano APU Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1649/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $135

Llano is going to make getting the $299 Best Buy special a hell of a lot more fun. I hope this does well for PC gaming.

Sttm wrote:Llano is going to make getting the $299 Best Buy special a hell of a lot more fun. I hope this does well for PC gaming.

I agree, but PC gaming is going to be hurt when the new consoles launch next fall... PCs have a year to shine before that happens though and like you said these platforms are going to be in sub $500 very soon. I'm tempted to replace my Core i7 965 machine from Q4 2008 with this system as I think it would handle daily tasks just fine and ~36W at idle is amazing.

I will be updating my HTPC's once the min-itx boards come out with this platform.

I guess I'm the only guy around here that's not over impressed. Sure it's nice that the onboard GPU can handle some games. It's really nice seeing a bump in performance using faster RAM (that hasn't always been the case in the real world). But other than that, I don't see what's so spectacular.

Oh, thanks for the shot of the AMD setup. I have been looking for the AMD cooler in other reviews, wasn't there. It looks exactly like the setup that came with my Opteron 170.

Did AMD send reviewers samples of the i3-2105 along with the A8-3850? The only review I've seen where this wasn't the direct competitor was over at G****D. Did they stipulate with their sample that you must compare it against the i3 only? What's going on there?

Is there any chance you could run a VMark test on the A8? I would love to see how this handles a Virtual Machine workload....thanks!!!