You appear to have completely missed the point for APU's, hence the facepalm comment you've already had.
Yes yes, I know what APU's are, but I'm looking at the overall performance of AMD products and like I said they do not cut it. Intel CPUs blow AMD CPUs out of the proverbial water and Nvidia GPUs have the edge over their AMD counterparts. Granted, the GPU cores in the APU dies beat their Intel counterparts, but who here will be using an on-die GPU? We all run high-end/enthusiast rigs, don't we? For what I use a PC for, an APU is virtually useless.
i think people are overestimating the use of apus. come on now, how many people build htpcs? because that's the main use of an apu. i cannot stress this enough, apus need to be steered hard towards laptops.
$129.99 at MicroCenter --- pretty good deal at that price imo. For the record, this is what I'm recommending to 90% of the people that ask me about building them a new PC. Sure, it's not going to cut it for the geeks (myself included) that hang out here, but for home users in most families, this is perfect and cheaper for them.
These APU's are nice for overclockers, you do gain some performance overclocking the cpu cores, gpu core, and memory.
silly i7 icore7 an a 8xx ...lol good grief. some ones not hard up for cash. my comp cost me under 700$ ill be able to play every game that comes out for quite some time. a icore7 an mobo alone will run ya 700 easily. then you got a 400$+ gpu? icore7's are intended for workstations(or at least I thought they were). why blow so much coin for overkill? people sure love to show off how much money they like to waste. :bang:
My 2600K and motherboard were a little over $400, combined. Who ever said that the Core i7 processors were for workstations? Xeon processors are intended for workstations and servers. Who said you have to buy a Core i7? The Core i5 is better for gaming. Correction, you'll be able to play every game that comes out for the next year, at medium or low settings. Some of us will be playing those games on high or ultra settings. Your mainstream processor comes with an integrated, budget GPU. Good luck playing the latest games "for quite some time". Without dual-graphics, you'll be struggling to play new games next year at anything but low settings.....and when DX12 comes, you'll have to replace your CPU and GPU, where the rest of us only need a GPU. I have an A4 5300 in my HTPC (and an A4 4000 on the shelf), and while it does everything it was intended to do, sometimes you just have to be realistic. AMD's APUs are entry-level and mainstream processors with integrated, budget GPUs. They will have a shorter lifespan than a Core i5 or i7 processor. A current generation i7 may be overkill for most, but if you're building a "gaming rig" you will get a longer upgrade cycle for the money. Yeah, I found that quite funny. My poor 2600K has been sweating bullets since it was installed. If my A4 5300 was asked to do even 10% of what my 2600K has been forced to do....you'd be seeing a mushroom cloud above my house from your door step....
I'm building an A10-7850K ITX rig this week. I've been using an early 2008 apple MBP as 24/7 pc for 6 years and I was able to sell it pretty fine, so with that money I though I could build something different with some gaming capabilities. I'll use an InWin H-Frame Mini with a 160W PicoPSU (the integrated PSU is a little bit noisy for me) and Thermalright AXP-100 with a Aerocool Dead Silence (the case side panel need some extenders for fitting that fan). This APUs should be more than enough for gaming on TV other games than BF4 Metro or crysis. (humblebundle stuff <3)
to me, it is over kill. I can upgrade my entire system yearly for what it would cost you and willing to pay. so your system will last 2-4 years? at 1200$+ cost. I could upgrade every 2 years for less. I just don't think its worth the price tag. what's wrong with medium settings? you still get to enjoy the game.
Considering you can still use overclocked Core 2 Quads to play just about any game (though, maybe not all games) shows that you can wait a lot longer than just 2 years. If you have at least 4GB of RAM you're all set too, though 8GB is a good safe number to have. All you really need to upgrade every couple years to play the latest games are GPUs. Personally, it makes more sense to me to get a GPU that can play as many of your favorite games at the detail level and resolution you prefer and once it starts getting obsolete, get a 2nd or 3rd one. Thats what I did and I'm still using a pair of GPUs that came out in 2009. Obviously things change when you do more than just gaming, but generally speaking, the only reason to get anything more than a quad core is to simply speed things up or if you have bad task management. Most workstation applications don't need anything better than an old quad core.
If you upgrade your system yearly, you'll spend more over a 5 year period than I will, by about double. Skylake will be my earliest CPU upgrade. That's still a year or more away and even that will be optional. There's no justification for Core i7 users to upgrade every 2 years. We can easily skip entire sockets. That's the advantage of an i7 processor. Budget processors have shorter lifespans and higher costs in the long run because of the need to upgrade more frequently. To keep gaming, you'll have to upgrade sooner than I will. My upgrades have never cost $1200....lol $1200 would be an entirely new system, not an upgrade. An upgrade is simply replacing outdated components. Probably 5-6..... Just sayin....
you folks really hate apu's. just saying.... so much did that 780ti cost ya? ...700$? my comp cost me 240$mobo+apu+dgpu)) cause I had everything else. just saying. my biggest problem with the bigger price tags on those higher end cpu's are simply a cash on hand matter. im not here for a forum rage. just making a point. apu's rock. I think its extremely cost efficient. I never compare the cpu aspect of the apu in comparison to anything intel has released.
Something that has to be replaced frequently, is never cost efficient. My HTPC had a cost of $150 for motherboard, processor and case (I had bd-rom, ram and hdd on hand). I could build an Intel equivalent system now for about $110 and have the same performance with half the power consumption. I don't hate APUs.... If I did, my HTPC wouldn't have an A4 5300 in it and I wouldn't have an A4 4000 sitting on my desk..... Technically, most of Intel's consumer level processors are APUs as they contain both a CPU and GPU. Intel just hasn't adopted the "APU" branding....
