AMD A8-3850 Llano APU and Lynx Platform Preview
Test Systems and SiSoft SANDRA
Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory frequency to DDR3-1600 and IGP frame buffer size to 512MB (where applicable). The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, defragged the hard drives, and ran the tests.
G.SKILL RipJawsX 8GB DDR-1866 Memory Kit
G.Skill supplied is with a dual-channel, 8GB (4GB x 2) DDR3-1866 memory kit for the purposes of this review. The kit was tested for compatibility with Llano / Lynx and Sandy Bridge, so it was a perfect match for our test systems here. Please note, while this kit is capable of 1866MHz, it ran at 1600MHz by default, in dual-channel mode, which is how we ran it on all of the test systems.
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2011, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2011 suite with AMD's Llano APU (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the APU running at its default clock speeds of 2.9GHz with 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM running in dual-channel mode on the ASRock A75 Pro4 motherboard.
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The SANDRA CPU test shows the AMD A8-3850 offering up just shy of 33GFLOPS, which puts it just behind an Intel Core i3. In the Multimedia tests, the APU finished right about on-par with similarly clocked Phenoms, which is to be expected considering they use similar CPU execution cores. And in the memory bandwidth tests, the A8-3850 offered about 14.8GB/s of peak bandwidth.
