Main Storage Drive – Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD over SATA III interface
Chassis – Lian Li T60 Test Bench
Displays – Dell U2711 Ultra Sharp
Operating System – Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
AMD AM1 (FS1b) Test System
Motherboard – MSI AM1I
Processor – AMD Athlon 5350
RAM – AMD Entertainment Series Radeon Memory, 1 x 4GB DDR3-1600 with 9-9-9-28 (CL9) timings
Graphics Card – None, integrated graphics only.
CPU Cooler – Stock 1A213LQ00 AMD-provided CPU cooler
Power Supply – Be Quiet Straight Power 400W
Main Storage Drive – Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD over SATA III interface, Patriot WildFire 120GB SSD for storage testing, Kingston 64GB HyperX USB 3.0 for USB testing
Chassis – Lian Li T60 Test Bench
Displays – Dell U2711 Ultra Sharp
Operating System – Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
Intel LGA 1150 Test System
Motherboard – MSI Z87I-Gaming
Processor – Intel Core i3 4330 (Turbo not supported).
RAM – AMD Performance Series Radeon Memory, 2 x 4GB DDR3-1866 with 9-10-9-27 (CL9) timings
Main Storage Drive – Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD over SATA III interface
Chassis – Lian Li T60 Test Bench
Displays – Dell U2711 Ultra Sharp
Operating System – Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
We would like to thank Gigabyte, MSI, Intel, AMD, Corsair, Kingston, Lian Li, Noctua and all our other partners who supplied us with test system equipment and hardware. Their generosity makes our testing possible and without them we wouldn’t be able to produce the reviews we do, so thank you!
Test Procedures
To conduct this review we have a huge battery of tests, benchmarks and games to battle through. Below we have listed each benchmark and any associated details about how we run the test, how long for (if applicable) and any settings that may be helpful to know.
CPU Tests
Cinebench R15 – multi threaded, single threaded and Open GL tests.
WPrime – a 32 million Pi calculation.
AIDA 64 Engineer – CPU and FPU tests: Queen, Zlib, AES, Hash, VP8, Julia, Mandel and SinJulia.
System Benchmarks
PCMark 8 – the Home and Work presets with Open CL acceleration enabled.
3DMark11: Performance preset.
3DMark (2013): Firestrike preset.
GPU and CPU Open CL Benchmarks
Basemark Open CL – Basic hardware optimisation running the full suite of tests on the GPU part only.
Compubench CL 1.1.3 – running only the Graphics: Raytrace and Vision: Optical Flow tests on GPU.
Luxmark – Open CL computation running on the CPU, GPU and GPU/CPU combined hardware.
Memory Benchmarks
AIDA64 – Memory read, write, copy and latency tests.
Productivity
x264 HD Benchmark 5.0 – one run and two passes using the default settings.
Handbrake – conversion of a short 90 second 1080p video file from MP4 to MKV format.
WinRAR – using the built in benchmark.
JPEG Decoder – AMD’s provided JPEG decoder benchmark that is run using the standard Windows JPEG decoder and AMD’s new HSA decoder.
Libre Office – spreadsheet computation and calculation performance.
TrueCrypt – default settings on the build in benchmark
Gaming
Battlefield 4 – low preset at 720p (1280 x 720). Measured using fraps and a 2 minute sequence of the game in the middle of the first campaign mission. Replayed with as much duplication as possible to ensure accurate results.
Tomb Raider – normal preset at 720p, v-sync off, motion blur and screen effects on using the built in benchmark.
Sleeping Dogs – normal preset at 720p using built in benchmark.
Bioshock Infinite – medium preset at 720p using the built in benchmark.
Batman Arkham Origins – normal geometry, everything else off. 720p using the built in benchmark.
Metro Last Light – Medium preset, AF4X and low motion blur at 720p using the built in benchmark.
Guacamelee Gold Edition – Maximum settings, AA, no V-Sync at 1080p (1920 x 1080)
Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack, AA, CPU High and no V-Sync at 1080p
Power and Thermals
Power consumption – total system power draw measured with the system in an idle desktop state, with a CPU load state, GPU load state and CPU+GPU combined load state. Load states were all provided by the AIDA 64 Engineer system stability test.
Thermals – temperatures as recorded by CPUID-HW Monitor and AIDA64. Note that the AMD temperature sensors function strangely so results should be taken as a rough guide not as strictly accurate. The load and idle temperatures are for the APU packages as a whole since the GPU parts did not have accurate temperature sensors. The temperatures were measured after a 5 minute APU AIDA 64 system stability load test.
Disk Performance
AIDA64 Random Read and Linear Read tests for both USB 3.0 disk performance and SATA III disk performance. We used two empty drives for each of the tests. The Kingston HyperX 64GB USB 3.0 flash drive for the USB 3.0 test and the Patriot Wildfire 120GB SATA III SSD for the SATA III test. Both drives are freshly formatted before each of the tests for maximum performance.