A10-5800K APU, Anybody Tried it yet?

[Ailos]

Originally Posted by Immigrant

With no discrete GPU? Only the integrated one?

**** ! i'VE JUST TESTED MY FPS AND IT'S PRETTY BAD actually. Around 15-20 or a bit more - that would mean unplayable in FPShooter terms. Seems Smegz was right if this readout is right, (I haven't played anything so long I don't even know what it means a good performance) It seems that i will have to install windows 7 again if that means getting a better performance. (and i've really tried to remain on the good side ) I will try installing Windows 7 on my old HDD and report back how it went

Anyway PS2 is the only game i'm interested in playing for the moment (and it was awhile when i played something as I said, almost a year or so) so it would interest me very much how the crossfire fares in PS2.

Ok, I will try installing Win7 on my old HDD and report back how it went.

Well, that was during one of the beta periods, right after they did some optimization and before they started stress testing the servers. When I say playable, I mean 30-40 fps in most places, but come anywhere close to the crown and it'd drop to single digits. Still, I could dog-fight in my reaver just fine. System specs there: A6-3650 with HD6530D and 4GB of DDR3-1600.

However, now with release, performance has taken a big hit - I suspect largely because I play on Matherson (which is always full). Regardless, even my i5-3570K with two cross fired 5770s struggles to go above 30 FPS. Now I'm looking at buying a 670 (or even a pair of them) on Monday. So once I get that in, I'll just buy another case and rebuild my older Phenom setup with the two 5770s and see how they do in WINE.

As far as crossfire in windows, I can tell you that my personal experience so far is that it makes a difference for the better, especially if you do some clever tweaking in CCC. However, I am still looking to get away from AMD, because (david vs Goliath arguments aside) the driver is just horrible at handling cross fired profiles of games they haven't bothered looking at (read:PS2) - the driver crashes frequently, and three quarters of the time, the game crashes with it.

[MrSmegz]

Originally Posted by Ailos

Well, that was during one of the beta periods, right after they did some optimization and before they started stress testing the servers. When I say playable, I mean 30-40 fps in most places, but come anywhere close to the crown and it'd drop to single digits. Still, I could dog-fight in my reaver just fine. System specs there: A6-3650 with HD6530D and 4GB of DDR3-1600.

However, now with release, performance has taken a big hit - I suspect largely because I play on Matherson (which is always full). Regardless, even my i5-3570K with two cross fired 5770s struggles to go above 30 FPS. Now I'm looking at buying a 670 (or even a pair of them) on Monday. So once I get that in, I'll just buy another case and rebuild my older Phenom setup with the two 5770s and see how they do in WINE.

As far as crossfire in windows, I can tell you that my personal experience so far is that it makes a difference for the better, especially if you do some clever tweaking in CCC. However, I am still looking to get away from AMD, because (david vs Goliath arguments aside) the driver is just horrible at handling cross fired profiles of games they haven't bothered looking at (read:PS2) - the driver crashes frequently, and three quarters of the time, the game crashes with it.

Are you playing at 1080p? That might be a bit much for a 5770. I have the same CPU and a single 670 like you want to get. Big fights will still spike down to the 30's, but never stay consternation below 40.

[Immigrant]

win7 ftw. i now have fps around 30 with all settings set at medium.

[MrSmegz]

Originally Posted by Immigrant

win7 ftw. i now have fps around 30 with all settings set at medium.

Wow thats pretty impressive for an APU... Still at 1280x1024?

[Goku]

Originally Posted by Immigrant

win7 ftw. i now have fps around 30 with all settings set at medium.

That isn't half bad at all. Thanks for the info.

[Rbstr]

I get ~20fps in fights with an i5-750 (the original generation) and my GTX570. It's almost always CPU bound and it really doesn't matter what graphical level I'm on.

Dropping big money on graphics cards for this game is a bad idea. A 670 is great if you're playing other games and enough for PS2, two won't give you anything.

[Ailos]

Originally Posted by MrSmegz

Are you playing at 1080p? That might be a bit much for a 5770. I have the same CPU and a single 670 like you want to get. Big fights will still spike down to the 30's, but never stay consternation below 40.

I run two 5770s in crossfire at 1600x900. The frames were absolutely perfect last week of beta, but since release, they're just horrible anytime I go near a really big fight.

Originally Posted by Rbstr

I get ~20fps in fights with an i5-750 (the original generation) and my GTX570. It's almost always CPU bound and it really doesn't matter what graphical level I'm on.

Dropping big money on graphics cards for this game is a bad idea. A 670 is great if you're playing other games and enough for PS2, two won't give you anything.

I am looking to the 670 for 3 reasons:

One of my outfit mates ran a system almost exactly like mine, switched to a 660 Ti and enabled gpu physx and found himself CPU bound less frequently.

And also I would like to bump the resolution up to triple monitor surround, which my current pair of 5770s really struggles with (though this is also kind of a long-term thing cause surround view is still fucked up within ps2).

The AMD catalyst drivers are total shit and are driving me nuts. I mean, the driver caused a bsod while I was editing a PowerPoint today, I mean ffs.

[Immigrant]

Originally Posted by MrSmegz

Wow thats pretty impressive for an APU... Still at 1280x1024?

yup, but i'd like to note it can drop to 25 if there's a lot going on nearby. anyway i'm pretty satisfied with how it works.

Originally Posted by Goku

That isn't half bad at all. Thanks for the info.

np

also if anyone gets it hybrid crossfired with a discrete gpu please report as i'm really interested how that would turn out... honestly I don't have the money to afford that experiment right now since i'm trying to save up every penny for a new car 'cause I doubt the old one I'm driving now will pass the yearly technical exam.

[MrSmegz]

Update: So I ended up building the A10 system for my Bro for Xmas. I set it up in my living room and hooked it up to my Onkyo Receiver to play on my Panasonic 60" Plasma. Specs are as follows:

A10 5800K APU - GPU @ 950MHZ (800 stock) - CPU underclocked to 3.5GHZ. Stock CPU.
Gskill Sniper 2133mhz DDR3 2x4GB
1.5TB Seagate 7200 RPM drive.
ASRock FM2A75 Pro4 Motherboard.
Corsair CX650 PSU.
All settings game settings were on Default Low in the UI (didn't mess with Useroptions.ini) and played at 1600x900.


Surprisingly, PlanetSide 2 was completely playable and enjoyable on this machine. I am used to playing at 2560x1440p, i5, GTX 670 PC, while a the quality drop was very noticeable and annoying at long range, everything ran rather smoothly.

My framerates were around 35-40 FPS when in a busy Warpgate with a lot of players and vehicles in my view. I went into a BioLab fight and would see the frames drop down to the 20-25 range, again not ideal, but about what most systems with better discreet cards and Phenom II Cpu's get. I also went to a large (not retardedly massive) Tower battle, this fight was in the 30-35 FPS range, again very playable.

This is where it gets weird. So the whole time I am playing PS2 with my FPS displayed, the game is showing to be [CPU] bottlenecked practically the WHOLE TIME. So on the stock heatsink which is a noisy piece of crap, I overclocked the system to 4.2ghz bumped the voltages, and played for about 20 min in some very large battles. The PC never crashed any my motherboard recorded the highest CPU temp of 81°C during that playtime, but I was still CPU bound, even on an integrated graphics solution.

The whole time I had a Kill-a-Watt hooked up to the system to get a guesstimate of the wattage the whole machine was pulling. OC'd to 4.2ghz the KaW was registering 145W at some points during game play. When I dropped the CPU voltage to 1.3v and underclocked the machine to as low as 3.0ghz, the peaks were only around 110W periodically, but would stay around 90W for the whole system.

So I can verify that if you want to build a system w/o a GPU and on the cheap, this is something that will work, in its limited capacity. Ill be interested to see next year what kind performance AMD can get out of its next gen APU, which will have a GCN graphics replacing the older VLI4 architecture on it now.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

For myself, I am considering using an APU for a HTPC of my own to play games from the sofa. I've been talking w/ a guy this week on [H]ardforums about his recent build and thought I would share that here.

ITX Trinity Steambox

[MrSmegz]

I also made this video last night of me playing PS2 on the APU.

[SpunkyKuma]

I have built a few A10 5800K systems for people and it's a pretty impressive system, you can disable the integrated graphics for a discrete card and then overclock that CPU a bit, I haven't played PS2 on it but it plays most games fine. Even with the integrated 7660D it's a pretty decent GPU, but that doesn't matter too much since PS2 is CPU intensive.

[zsx]

I've gotten to test this with a few different setups as i've upgraded my cpu over the past year from an A6-5400K with 8gb 1600Mhz ram and a old 320gb HDD to a [email protected] with 7970@1050Mhz/1500Mhz and 1tb seagate HDD on windows 8.
I remember that even on the A6 the game was slightly playable note i had it OC'd to 4.3GHz or 4.2GHz can't remember witch one but that was like a constant 10fps on low like super low@1280x1024. When i upgraded to the A10 i noticed significant impromments roughly 20fps on the highest preset at the time ,high, this was with a 4.5GHz overclock@1280x1024 that i achieved with a hyper 212 cooler no prob. I have tried time and time again to push my processor over 4.5GHz but it always results in blue screens or other strange issues. Recently I managed to get it to 4.6GHz but I had to increase the vcore to an insane 1.6v not sure if all A10s are as limited as mine this worked but i started to notice after a day or two some issues so i went back to 4.5GHz. A few months later i got a asus radeon 7770 ghz edition with 2GB GDDR5 i noticed that that also made a nice improvement in my fps 30fps on ultra setting that now existed this was on the 1080p monitor i got several months after getting the 7770.
as of this november i get about 20-30 fps in the biggest battles but it feels relatively smooth specs are as follows.
cpu: [email protected]
mobo: F2A85-v pro
memory: 8GB DDR3 1600MHz 9-9-9-24 dual channel OC'd@1866MHz 10-11-11-28
storage: 1Tb seagate 7200RPM
GPU: gigabyte 7970 3GB GDDR5 reference cooler design this card seems to overclocks very well got 1200MHz core/ 1600MHz mem but i had to up the voltage and it was a bit to much for my psu that is in great need of an upgrade
PSU: thremaltake tr-2 500W probably going to upgrade to a corsair rm850 or ax850i i want to make sure i have plenty of headroom if i want to crossfire 7970s
some optimizations that helped me with my lag problems:
unpark cpu optimization seems to help a lot
large link address aware(not really that much use anymore)
set timer resolution