How viable are AMDs iGPUs for gaming at 720p

I've been asked by a teenaged console gamer about the possibility of replacing his elderly homework PC (single core vista era relic) and aging console (XB360) with a gaming PC. To keep costs down he's planning to continue using an existing 1366x768 monitor, so he doesn't need a high powered card. (And if he does get a 1080p monitor *next* summer, that'd be the time to look at an upgrade.) What I don't know is if he could initially get away with just using the integrated graphics on an AMD chip, or would still need a lower end discrete card to maintain FPS at decent quality settings.

He doesn't have the job yet, and I suspect his parents will make him save more of his pay than he realizes, so I'm not looking for an actual build guide yet. For now I'm just trying to gather enough information to offer reasonable "how much will it cost" guidance the next time we talk.

With a Kaveri APU, one of the quad-core models, 720p gaming is pretty damned good. 720p is the sweetspot, really. Those APU's love high-clocked dual-channel DDR3, so get a good kit of DDR3 memory and try to clock it up to 2400mhz if you can for best results. Older games can even get away with 900p and 1080p with good framerates and decent eyecandy. Shadows and AA seem to kill the iGPU's though.

My brother has the Kaveri 7850K and played BF4 on the iGPU @ 1080p. He is used to playing on the Xbox so he didn't have issues with the 7850K. I just gave him my old HD7770 and it will be just a bit better and less heat for the CPU to endure.

At 720p he should have no issue.

durquavian said:

less heat for the CPU to endure.

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The only thing that can really heat up an APU is if you load up all of the cores.

I've run scrypt miners on all of my APUs to max out the IGPs and I think I maybe got a 10C rise in temperature. On the other hand when I ran scrypt or sha256 on all four APU cores, the thing would near melt down within seconds.

I recommend to anyone making an APU build, regardless of the part, trash the OEM heatsink because it's godawful. The AM3 stock heatsink is lightyears better and you can get them for dirt cheap on Ebay.

^Oh yeah, definitely. I'm not sure why the quality of the boxed heatsinks declined so much. The AM3 ones with the heatpipes are infinitely better than anything that came afterwards.

The APU heatsinks are so light that you'd think the aluminum block they were made of was hollow. Seriously, you can put the APU heatsink sans the fan on a scale with a few sheets of printer paper and the printer paper would launch the thing into orbit. It has no mass to it whatsoever.

I think the last bad heatsink design AMD had was on the old Socket 462. Those things were a legacy from the Socket 7 and 370 era and had no business on a Athlon with a 62-89W TDP. Not to mention the spring tension on some of those heatsinks was so high that you'd crack the die halfway trying to clip the thing on.

It wasn't just AMDs stock 462 cooler that was bad; the base attachment mechanism sucked. I crushed an Athlon XP 1400 with an aftermarket copper cooler.

DanNeely said:

It wasn't just AMDs stock 462 cooler that was bad; the base attachment mechanism sucked. I crushed an Athlon XP 1400 with an aftermarket copper cooler.

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I had a TT Volcano 7 that broke one of the plastic tabs off an old Socket A board. I had just shut it down to swap out the Tbird 750 for a XP 1800+. Tab snapped, and the HS went airborne.

Never seen a chunk of metal fly like that.

DanNeely said:

It wasn't just AMDs stock 462 cooler that was bad; the base attachment mechanism sucked. I crushed an Athlon XP 1400 with an aftermarket copper cooler.

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This is why they started making shims for 462 CPUs.

Though I never saw one during the life of that socket. The first time I saw one was in 2011 when I bought as Athlon XP 3000+ machine from a second hand store. A piece of metal flopped off the CPU when I pulled the heatsink off and it took me a bit to remember what it existed for.

GiGaBiTe said:

This is why they started making shims for 462 CPUs.

Though I never saw one during the life of that socket. The first time I saw one was in 2011 when I bought as Athlon XP 3000+ machine from a second hand store. A piece of metal flopped off the CPU when I pulled the heatsink off and it took me a bit to remember what it existed for.

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Too much tension created by the standard spring clip design. The damn heatsink only needs to make gentle contact, it doesn't need 100lbs of tension squeezing it against the chip