While Haswell has captured the attention of enthusiasts and overclockers, the launch of AMD’s Richland APU has caught the attention of the more mainstream and budget-conscious market segment. The entire range of Richland APUs will be very aggressively priced given AMD’s tradition of pricing and we can particularly see this shining through with the AMD A4-4000 APU which launched yesterday in Europe and should pop-up at most European retail stores today. In the UK you can get it already at online retailers for around £32.
The A4-4000 is AMD’s entry level option and it offers two cores at 3GHz with a turbo frequency of 3.2GHz. It retains motherboard compatibility with all FM2 socket motherboards and it has a measly 1MB of L2 Cache. However, its main “win” over the competition is that it can offer a lot more graphics performance thanks to the integrated HD 7480 graphics part clocked at up to 720MHz.
As the above AMD graphic demonstrates the A4-4000 beats the similarly priced Celeron and Pentium competition from Intel in terms of graphics. The AMD A4-4000 would make an ideal 720p gaming system for someone on an extremely tight budget.
What are your thoughts on the new A4-4000 and its pricing? Will you be buying one?
I’d actually seriously consider one of these for a HTPC/Emulation box for under the TV. Whilst AMD might sell somewhat lacklustre gaming CPUs at present, these APU’s are really good value for money.