Testing Memory Speeds on AMD's A8-3850 Llano APU

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Legit Reviews has posted the results of their tests with different memory speeds on AMD's A8-3850 Llano APU. The results are rather interesting, I think you'll want to check this one out. For those of you that haven't seen it, our Llano Fusion A Series coverage can be found here.

We found that the memory bandwidth ranges from 13GB/s to 16GB/s with typical dual channel memory kits on our AMD A8-3850 APU and Gigabyte A75-UD4H motherboard. This difference doesn't sound that great, but a 3GB/s increase when dealing with 13GB is a very nice 23% performance increase. Most of this performance gain is seen when moving up from a 1333Mhz to a 1600MHz memory kit is where you'll see the largest performance jump.
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I hope these chips get into more mainstream OEM desktops. I feel like it'll really help open up the world of PC gaming when people have easily accessible systems that can play the newest games without a discrete chipset.
 
What is that article supposed to show anyway? Those numbers suck. At 1797 MHZ my I7 with Corsair CL7 at CL9 and 1T gets 40GB/S. I can still speed it up some at higher base clocks.
 
Looks like avoiding DDR3-1333 on Llano is a good choice from the non-synthetic benchmarks. The non-synthetic differences between 1600 and 1866 are mostly pretty marginal.
 
BBA said:
What is that article supposed to show anyway? Those numbers suck. At 1797 MHZ my I7 with Corsair CL7 at CL9 and 1T gets 40GB/S. I can still speed it up some at higher base clocks.
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You missed the point and/or were focusing on the wrong numbers. Look at the gaming benchmarks. While the CPU intensive benchmarks show very little gain with faster memory the combined CPU+GPU functionality for gaming shows a large jump in framerates going from 1333 to 1600 memory. In other words, the CPU side doesn't really need more bandwidth but the GPU is starved with cheap budget RAM.
 
Would like to see someone do a test with oc'd ram into the 2k's. Not sure if that's possible but assumed it would be depending on the motherboard. Honestly wouldn't mind seeing a full review on oc'd Llano's. Only one I have seen is that youtube one on fps increases.
 
Fantasyalive said:
Would like to see someone do a test with oc'd ram into the 2k's. Not sure if that's possible but assumed it would be depending on the motherboard. Honestly wouldn't mind seeing a full review on oc'd Llano's. Only one I have seen is that youtube one on fps increases.
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http://www.anandtech.com/show/4478/asrock-a75-extreme6-review-and-desktop-llano-overclocking/4

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-a8-3850-llano,2975-7.html

The Anandtech article in-particular looks at faster ram speeds, with DDR3-2200.

Am I the only one here who knows how to use Google? I only had to type Llano Overclock into it and look at the first five results people :D
 
DedEmbryonicCe11 said:
You missed the point and/or were focusing on the wrong numbers. Look at the gaming benchmarks. While the CPU intensive benchmarks show very little gain with faster memory the combined CPU+GPU functionality for gaming shows a large jump in framerates going from 1333 to 1600 memory. In other words, the CPU side doesn't really need more bandwidth but the GPU is starved with cheap budget RAM.
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Ok, I can see that point. What it shows is they could have done a lot better with a small investment in memory bandwidth.

You can't argue that it will make for better cheaper laptops...because you are not going to overclock memory on a cheap laptop (the options will not be there) and a much better solution can be had with Intel and a dedicated video card in the graphics for not much more in cost. Besides that, it will never make the high end gaming laptops...so what market are they really going to be doing good in?
 
defaultluser said:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4478/asrock-a75-extreme6-review-and-desktop-llano-overclocking/4

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-a8-3850-llano,2975-7.html

The Anandtech article in-particular looks at faster ram speeds, with DDR3-2200.

Am I the only one here who knows how to use Google? I only had to type Llano Overclock into it and look at the first five results people :D
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ah, oops. I don't go over to anandtech often, thanks for the links though. Hmm that really isn't a review on overclocking the Llano, just kinda of a 1 page summery.
 
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defaultluser said:
This review adds nothing to what we already know.
Anandtech already did a preview showing 1333 versus 1866 a month ago:
...
Leave it to Legit Reviews to be weeks late. And for all that massive time gap they bring no new revelations to the table.
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Well someone is going to be first, and it's nice to see other sites confirm similar conclusions, numbers, etc.
 
In the review, why does their task manager pic indicate 8 cores? There are only 4 cpu cores on this chip.

stalker-cpu.jpg
 
venm11 said:
In the review, why does their task manager pic indicate 8 cores? There are only 4 cpu cores on this chip.

http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/1506/stalker-cpu.jpg[/I MG][/quote]He disabled reverse hyperthreading and all 8 hardware threads were fully exposed. :p

From the URL, that picture came from a different review: [url]http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1506/15/[/url]

The "correct" urls don't seem to exist (yet):
[IMG]http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/1652/re5-cpu-usage.jpg
stalker-cpu.jpg


Obviously in the mad dash to get this memory scaling info out before any other site, some corners were cut. ;)
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pxc said:
He disabled reverse hyperthreading and all 8 hardware threads were fully exposed. :p

From the URL, that picture came from a different review: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1506/15/

The "correct" urls don't seem to exist (yet):
re5-cpu-usage.jpg

stalker-cpu.jpg


Obviously in the mad dash to get this memory scaling info out before any other site, some corners were cut. ;)
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Yeah, I never go to Legit Reviews for anything because they rarely put any effort into the damn reviews. You'd think they'd put more effort into the feature attraction of their website.

Who cares if they're "Legit" reviews, there's not point unless they're insightful and readable :D
 
BBA said:
You can't argue that it will make for better cheaper laptops...because you are not going to overclock memory on a cheap laptop (the options will not be there) and a much better solution can be had with Intel and a dedicated video card in the graphics for not much more in cost. Besides that, it will never make the high end gaming laptops...so what market are they really going to be doing good in?
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AMD has been in the low end market for years now, and that's just what they are focusing on, intel is priced high for their products, unlike amd, especially when you can build a complete system for $300.95 with AMD a-8 chip. and it competes with the i3 and i5 series, and also you cut out the extra cost of a graphics card, the discrete and integrated 6550 is plenty to handle most games at med-high quality.
less cost, more uses, and graphics to play most of today's games at medium or higher detail levels for 300 bucks or less[when deals are going] = win for the average person who doesnt have $500 or more to spend. especially where the economy stands here and the U.S. and also the global economy isn't doing so great either.
 
caseychaos said:
AMD has been in the low end market for years now, and that's just what they are focusing on, intel is priced high for their products, unlike amd, especially when you can build a complete system for $300.95 with AMD a-8 chip. and it competes with the i3 and i5 series, and also you cut out the extra cost of a graphics card, the discrete and integrated 6550 is plenty to handle most games at med-high quality.
less cost, more uses, and graphics to play most of today's games at medium or higher detail levels for 300 bucks or less[when deals are going] = win for the average person who doesnt have $500 or more to spend. especially where the economy stands here and the U.S. and also the global economy isn't doing so great either.
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This is perfect, Llano isn't built or priced or anything to compete with an i7. It's built to give great performance on a budget. Alot of the people who the Llano chip is designed for are you going to love the performance they get out of it. Like mine, I have the A8-3500 in my laptop. This laptop is great, I can achieve 5 hours of browsing the web and typing a paper. I can also start up L4D2 and play it at max settings with the HD 6750M that is in this laptop. I like this laptop and feel that it performs well enough for the things I do, that I sold my Quad-core desktop. I don't encode anything on a regular bases or do I base every decision I make off benchmarks alone. I'm quite impressed with the performance of this chip so far. It did take some power management tweaks to getting it running how I want it to run, but for most it wont be an issue.
 
Sojuuk said:
I want someone to throw some 2200mhz ram at it.
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What's the point?

If you are going to spend so much premium on memory for Llano do yourself favour and get Phenom II X4 , 1333 ram and nice discreet GPU.
 
Sorry to necro,
but I see this "unanswered" thread as I Google the topic in my own interest. :)

I got me a Llano.
Got 8GB of Ram for $40, when the cheapest at the time was $34.

Like any decent RAM I put in, I can run 2200Mhz no problem.
200%+ run on all unused RAM with MemTestPro kind of "no problem". ;)
Gives the iGPU 35.2GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Along with fillrates of 7.2 GPixel/s and 17.9 GTexel/s (900Mhz core OC),
that makes the integrated GPU better than a stock HD 6570 (DDR3).
Not bad for the few extra buck decent RAM costs.

If you can't afford a DDR5 card, it's really a neat budget route.
Pick up a DDR5 HD 6670 when you can,
and Crossfire with the iGPU for a "free" boost.
This can put performance at levels remarkably near my main system in a lot of cases.
That being a 2500K + GTX 460, I'd say 1/3 the cost is really amazing. :D
 
I guess one benefit of Llano over a Phenom II X4 is that if you go to a discrete GPU at some later date, the Llano's draw less power. If you use an AMD GPU, then you'll get a the boost from the on-board ALU too.
 
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