Thinking of getting a new motherboard and an AMD APU

[RudeCurve]

So I currently have a AMD FX4100 OC to 4.3GHz installed in a motherboard with integrated Radeon HD4250. As of right now I'm looking for faster graphics and lower power with equal or higher CPU performance. The A10-5800K which Microcenter has on sale for $100 looks like a good choice. It has a Radeon 7660d onboard which seems to be a very nice upgrade from the 4250. I also want a new motherboard which supports USB3.0 as my current one only has USB 2.0 which is way to slow for my external HDDs.

So my question is should I wait for the next generation of AMD APUs or get the A10-5800K? Any recommendations on a good miniITX/uATA motherboard with OC ability and under $100?

Also should I get Windows 8? I'm still running XP Pro 32-bit but want to switch to a 64-bit Windows so I could add more usable RAM to my PC.

 

[Lightman]

I'm using my A10-5800K in HTPC on Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H and it's great for what I need it for.

Board is a capable OC'er and when I was toying with it I've squeezed 1.1GHz IGPU clock, 2.2+GHz CL11 from my memory and nice 4.6GHz CPU clock. But that was not extreme pushing, just treading waters and definitely too much for small closed box on old A64 X2 6400+ 125W CPU air cooler.
My aim with this box was power efficiency and I've tweaked it to run on lower than stock CPU vCore with 4.0GHz all core clock (4.3GHz Turbo). iGPU set to 950MHz and Memory @2.15GHz.

It's low power when idle (27W-31W at the wall), and reasonably good when gaming (100W-120W).
Watching moves on it is not an issue, and gaming is on reasonable level. My son uses this PC as his daily game PC for Minecraft and I tried many other games like Trine 2 (in 3D!), Legend of Grimrock, Crysis, Renegade Ops and so on. They are all playable on different quality settings and quite enjoyable on large TV.

Good thing about FM2 is that you can still upgrade to new and upcoming A10-6xxxK when they become available. When I build my HTPC last year I was planning on upgrading to new APU, but to be honest I don't see a big enough difference to justify that steep yet. Maybe after official launch something will change my mind again, but it looks like the step is not big enough to bother.

Lastly I'm on W8Pro x64 and not regretting it for HTPC at all. Very quick loading times even from oldish Samsung F1 640GB HDD at about 20s and it's stable. Also better thread management in W8 helps with extracting better performance from AMD APU's.

Hope this helps.

 

[Malo]

What are your intended purposes for the PC? Have you considered the A10-5700 65w instead of the 100w version to keep power and heat down? It's really all about your requirements and intentions for it.

 

[RudeCurve]

I'm using my A10-5800K in HTPC on Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H and it's great for what I need it for. Hope this helps.

Thanks for your input Lightman...it was very helpful.

What are your intended purposes for the PC? Have you considered the A10-5700 65w instead of the 100w version to keep power and heat down? It's really all about your requirements and intentions for it.

This PC will mainly be used for training on a flight simulator...PheonixRC/RealFlight that's why I wanted the faster graphics. I don't do any PC gaming. Other uses will be light video editing of HD content, watching Blu-ray movies and other HD 1080p videos, surfing the internet, email etc. I have not considered the A10-5700 only because I didn't know it was lower wattage and had the same IGPU, but now that you mentioned it, it's definitely a contender.

 

[Blazkowicz]

You may wait a little for the A-10 6700, it's the same thing as the A-8 5700 but +10% better. (edit: only +5% better on the GPU)
http://www.hardware.fr/news/13073/biostar-da-voile-apu-richland-desktop.html

There's no point in upgrading from the 5000 to the 6000 series, it's actually the same thing with a small clock bump and finer power management.

Though, I think your planned sidegrade is a bit useless. You could add a Radeon 7750, a PCIe 1x USB3 card (cheapest will do) and dial down your o/c (can you get a slightly lower voltage?). The only issue would be if your only PCIe 1x slot gets covered by a dual slot gaphics card (I try not to think about such horror too much )
Loss of L3 cache means you can get lower or slightly lower CPU performance with an APU.

 

[RudeCurve]

I have a 1U chassis so it has to be able to fit inside....separate cards won't work so I try to stay away from them. In any event the upcoming 65W A10-6700 looks like a nice performance boost over the 100W A10-5800 so I'll probably wait for that. I want to go back to a low profile HSF so I could put the cover back on my 1U case. Anyway I'm currently running the PheonixRC simulator at high settings on my PC and it runs fine but when upping it to highest it slows down and there's tearing too.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=34790391&postcount=1

 

[Blazkowicz]

Interesting, the latest stuff to appear on the market is Intel's "Thin Mini-ITX" and so the 1U looks like a bigger, pizza box version of it.
I've seen the Noctua NH-L9i recommended for a low profile HSF, and so there's the Noctua NH-L9a as an AMD variant which might be good, though it ain't the cheapest thing ever. But dunno if you need some passive copper instead and manage to cool it with the 40mm case fans instead.

A small computer club I know was given about 20 1U dual Opteron servers! (old, single core ones). It's all identical Sun servers, with dual 10k rpm drives. Should have around 2GB or 4GB memory I think (we'll see). I might hack one of them in a litteral sense.. Drill dirty holes in the case over where the CPUs are supposed to be and have air flow there. Deal with the terrible 40mm fans (replacement or undervolting).
This might be fun, though the integrated graphics are probably quite terrible.

 

[RudeCurve]

Thanks for the tip on the HSF..I may have to buy that model. I still have a low profile HSF for my C2D before I upgraded to the FX4100 but it probably won't work with AMD mount so that means I'll have to spend more money. I'm gonna sell the old C2D+motherboard+RAM to make up some of the funds so that's good. It's been sitting around gathering dust anyway.

Here's another low profile HSF option that's more reasonably priced. Fan is smaller though so it may be louder.

http://www.gelidsolutions.com/products/index.php?lid=2&cid=12&id=80&tab=1

And this:

http://www.reeven.com/schwarzberg-normal/

Those 20 1U servers project sounds pretty cool. Keep us updated on your progress, sounds like fun.

 

[Blazkowicz]

There's this newly launched Zalman cooler, but not yet in stores so we don't know the price. It has a very small weight.
http://www.hardware.fr/news/13081/zalman-cnps2x-27mm-hauteur.html

 

[RudeCurve]

There's this newly launched Zalman cooler, but not yet in stores so we don't know the price. It has a very small weight.
http://www.hardware.fr/news/13081/zalman-cnps2x-27mm-hauteur.html

That looks like a very nice low profile design...very beautiful too..

Anyway I changed my FX4100 back to stock clocks and it hasn't surpassed 60W yet.

 

[NRP]

Those should run PhoenixRC just fine. I run it on an older AMD Neo laptop with integrated AMD gpu, and it works well enough.

 

[eastmen]

if you can hold out , maybe see how hazwell shakes up amd's prices ?

I have an brazos 1.6ghz in my media center but might trade it out for a haswell i3 .

 

[UniversalTruth]

That looks like a very nice low profile design...very beautiful too..

The question remains how efficient it is. Can it dissipate 40-50 W?

I know it is written 120 W but it is a lie and if you don't want to keep your parts super hot, then better stay away of such perversion...

 

[Blazkowicz]

whoop-de-doo! I've looked at memory prices and ddr3 2133 has gotten cheap (it's an official JEDEC spec nowadays)

That looks charming on that A10 6700 and I'm now officially envious.

 

[Blazkowicz]

The question remains how efficient it is. Can it dissipate 40-50 W?

I know it is written 120 W but it is a lie and if you don't want to keep your parts super hot, then better stay away of such perversion...

They've been doing low-profile round copper coolers for about a decade (i.e. stuff to put on a graphics card). But being so CAUTIOUS is probably a good idea, how the hell did they get that figure I don't know. Gotta polish that CPU and have full rpm case fans? It's okay if the temp is below 105C, right.
Also I reckon that you definitely need to get heat out of that 1U case no matter what.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

whoop-de-doo! I've looked at memory prices and ddr3 2133 has gotten cheap (it's an official JEDEC spec nowadays)

That looks charming on that A10 6700 and I'm now officially envious.

Heh, you should have seen the prices about 5 months ago. Prices for DDR3 2133 are 50% higher than they were back then. I ended up buying 32 GB of memory just before the memory prices started to skyrocket. They went all the up to about double the price I paid, and now have fallen back to being only about 50% more.

Regards,
SB