R9-270 benches seem low

DraginDime

DraginDime

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feel free to skip to the TL;DR

I recently slapped together 2 rigs for my kids. Since I hadn't purchased any AMD hardware in a while, I figured I would build both these rigs with AMD parts. So I grabbed up a couple new APUs A6-6400K, dropped them in Gigabyte F2A78M-D3H boards, threw in 4GB of Crucial Ballistix ram, and I was off to the races.

I wasn't at all impressed with the APU's graphical power. I think I had my hopes a little too high there. For web surfing and basic use, it's probably more than fine. Oh well, no biggie, so to alleviate that problem I grabbed up 2x MSI R9-270 gpus. And they did a pretty decent job.

So today, work has been slow, and I thought I would play around and run some 3dMark to see what kind of numbers I can get out of those R9-270s. This is where my questions start. I'm getting much lower scores than I expected. I've been comparing scores between my HTPC (intel i3-4130, GTX 750Ti, 4GB @1866mhz) and the AMD rigs I built. I expected the 270s to score a bit higher than the 750Ti.

The main differences in systems are HTPC has Win 8.1(x64) on SSD, AMD rigs have Win 7(x64) on HDD. My HTPC has all kinds of crap installed on it, vs the AMD rigs which are pretty fresh.

Here's some of the scores I've gotten so far. AMD 14.9 drivers, Nvidia was 344.60

Firestrike
R9-270 - 2936 http://www.3dmark.com/fs/3272701
750Ti - 4047 http://www.3dmark.com/fs/3272687

Ice Storm Unlimted
R9-270 - 46712 http://www.3dmark.com/is/2468031
750Ti - 95967 http://www.3dmark.com/is/2468028

Cloud Gate
R9-270 - 4966 http://www.3dmark.com/cg/2266438
750Ti - 10547 http://www.3dmark.com/cg/2266477


TL;DR
R9-270 scores lower than GTX 750Ti in similar specced systems.
What's holding the R9-270s back?
Or is 3Dmark just shitty on AMD?
 
Those crappy APU's are holding your 270 back...that's what's doing it. The Intel i3's are little beasts in pushing graphics.
 
I was wondering if that's what it was. I didn't think it would be that much of a bottleneck. Guess I may have to see about swapping them out sometime.
 
Yeah its only a 2 core apu and the Intel has hyperthreading and even beats a 4 core apu in games. Have you thought about overclocking them as they are the black series so they have an unlocked multiplier.
 
Yeah, but I only pushed it to 4.1ghz so far. I'm on stock coolers so I didn't want to push them too hard. The stock cooler fans for these things are tiny, they seem much smaller than any other AMD stock cooler I've seen. I could pick up a couple Hyper 212s I suppose, but by the time you add that price to the cost of the APUs, I could have just went with a couple intel cpus for a few bucks more.

I'm not sure if I'm more surprised that the i3-4130 is that fast, or if these APUs are that slow. I didn't think there would be such a huge difference.

I think I'll play around with overclocking some this weekend to see if I can get some more performance out of these rigs. If not, I may think about switching mobo/cpus for something else.
 
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DraginDime said:
Yeah, but I only pushed it to 4.1ghz so far. I'm on stock coolers so I didn't want to push them too hard. The stock cooler fans for these things are tiny, they seem much smaller than any other AMD stock cooler I've seen. I could pick up a couple Hyper 212s I suppose, but by the time you add that price to the cost of the APUs, I could have just went with a couple intel cpus for a few bucks more.

I'm not sure if I'm more surprised that the i3-4130 is that fast, or if these APUs are that slow. I didn't think there would be such a huge difference.

I think I'll play around with overclocking some this weekend to see if I can get some more performance out of these rigs. If not, I may think about switching mobo/cpus for something else.
Click to expand...

Glad you tried that already. I wouldn't even bother as another 100-200mhz is not going to make much difference even with a better cooler. Those Intel cpu's are that much better, especially going against a 2 core AMD apu. Good luck!
 
Seems to be as I overclock the scores are going down instead of up. The APU seems to give the best scores at stock clocks, haha. Oh well, the kids can live with them for a while.
 
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