AMD Kabini AM1 Athlon 5350 APU (FS1b) Review

System Performance

PCMark 8

The PCMark 8 Home benchmark includes workloads that reflect common tasks for a typical home user. These workloads have low computational requirements making PCMark 8 Home suitable for testing the performance of low-cost tablets, notebooks and desktops. Home includes workloads for web browsing, writing, gaming, photo editing, and video chat. The results are combined to give a PCMark 8 Home score for your system. Download here.

PCMark8’s results suggest that while the Athlon 5350 part isn’t the fastest it still provides a good overall experience. A score of 1908 may not be breaking any records but for the average home user this result equates to fluid everyday performance. The result isn’t that far off the result of Intel’s Core i3 4330 showing the value of AMD’s APUs.

3DMark11

3DMark 11 is a DirectX 11 video card benchmark test for Windows that is designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance. 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of DirectX 11 features including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Download here.

DX11 Gaming performance isn’t a strong point of Kabini. We see good numbers when considering what Intel’s HD graphics of more expensive parts perform like but the result of just 698 effectively means all demanding games will be a struggle. Kabini will be best suited for light weight indie games, browser games and so on.

3DMark

The new 3DMark includes everything you need to benchmark your hardware. With three all new tests you can bench everything from smartphones and tablets, to notebooks and home PCs, to the latest high-end, multi-GPU gaming desktops. Download here.

3DMark again shows us that the AM1 Kabini part is not made for gaming. However, for once I am surprised to see that physics (CPU) scores so much better than graphics (GPU) in this test. Normally AMD work things the other way around.

In Cloudgate, a test in 3DMark aimed at entry level PCs, we see a much better result. AMD’s Athlon 5350 is surprisingly capable of running lightweight gaming type loads.