Gigabyte A75-UD4H AMD A75 Motherboard with AMD A8-3850 Review

SiSoft Sandra 2011 Benchmarks

In our tests, we compare the A8-3850 on Gigabyte A75-UD4H running on default clock against the Intel Core i5-2500K running on ASUS P8Z68-V Pro. Both systems runs at C7-8-7-20-1T. The system is then overclocked with GPU set to 900MHz (default is 600MHz) and APU o/c to 26 x 133 (3.458GHz) with memory at C9-9-9-27-2T. When system memory is overclocked, the GPU memory is raised too from 400MHz to 667MHz.

Memory Benchmark

The A8-3850 runs on a default clock of 29 x 100MHz = 2.9GHz. We managed to overclock it to 26 x 133 = 3.45GHz with just slight voltage bump.

Using the dual stick Kingston DDR3-2133 memory module, the system booted up in DDR3-1333. We have to manually adjust the select the memory ratio of DDR3-1866 from the drop down menu. The voltage must be set to 1.65v as it defaults to 1.5v in the BIOS.

We ran the test and we can easily see that the Intel Core i5 2500K remains to be better in terms of memory controller. Even when we increase the cpu clk to 133MHz, it didn’t help a lot, giving us 17.12 GBps. Although it is lower than the Intel counterpart, it outshine the Phenom II X6 1100T at 13.16GB/s using the same ram settings.

What about arithmetic and multimedia

I know that it is unfair to compare a Core i5-2500K which is of a higher tier than the A8-3850. Nevertheless we put it in for references.

In this test, the APU fares at 39.19 GOPS which is slower then the Intel counterpart. When the APU is overclocked to 3.45GHz, it is at 46.52, still 38% behind the Core i5 2500K.

In processor multimedia, the difference is very apparent. It is not half of the Intel counterpart when dealing with multimedia. The good news is that with overclocking, we are able to push the default of 48 Mpixel/s to 57.28 Mpixel/s , a 19% boost.

When it comes to transcoding, the APU A8-3850 falls behind the Intel counterpart. In fact, a Phenom II X6 is better off at 692 Kbps.

Below is another set of tests introduced in the new version of SiSoft Sandra targeting the APUs.

We can see the improvements when the system is overclocked. Video Memory Bandwidth and GP( GPU/CPU) bandwidth is in GB/s, Video Rendering and GP(GPU/CPU) Processor is in mpixel/s.