HTPC-upgrade advice: AMD Richland A8-7600 or Kaveri A10-6700T ???

[tomtomme]

So I want to upgrade my HTPC to a 45 Watt APU to be able to play some more games from the couch (low-end steamboxing ).
Since the A8-7600 is delayed I thought I could maybe go for the availabel A10-6700T.

What are your thoughts?

Note that I will not install catalyst (doesn?t work well with xbmc). So the 6700T would run r600 and the 7600 radeonSI (current stable mesa+kernel).

Possible Upgrade Specs:

Richland 32 nm A8-7600  	3,1 (3,3) GHz 	2 ? 2 MB 	384 GCNcores    654 (720) MHz    45 W  TurboCore3	FM2+   DDR3-2133 MHz
Kaveri   28 nm A10-6700T 	2,5 (3,5) GHz 	2 ? 2 MB 	384 VLIW4cores	720 (N/A) MHz  	 45 W  TurboCore3 	FM2    DDR3-1866 MHz

Given:
- very flat / small case so a dGPU or >45 W is out of the question
- 120 W power supply
- very silent and it should stay this way
- AMD E-350 (Zacate)
- 2x2 GB 1333 RAM
- 128 GB SSD + 3TB
- openSUSE tumbleweed

thx, tomme

[curaga]

Given the current state of drivers, I would recommend the Richland for r600g. The hw perf difference is about a dozen %, but with current drivers you'll likely get better perf from the Richland, not to mention the driver quality.

HSA apps may appear in the future, but I doubt it gets any major adoption in the next few years.

[tomtomme]

Given the current state of drivers, I would recommend the Richland for r600g. The hw perf difference is about a dozen %, but with current drivers you'll likely get better perf from the Richland, not to mention the driver quality.

HSA apps may appear in the future, but I doubt it gets any major adoption in the next few years.

Thx for the input
I read now somewhere that the richland 6700T only supports DDR3 1600 mhz. That would be huge, wouldn?t it? Since the kaveri 7600 shall work with ddr3 2400 mhz. Can anyone confirm this?
And for r600 - are the more optimizations planned?
otherwise radeonsi might have the same level / quality in 6 months or so - correct?

[curaga]

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/AMD-A10-Series%20A10-6700T.html

Cpu-world says 1866MHz, but you might want to check AMD's site. There isn't anything planned for r600g as far as I know, and theoretically radeonsi could match it in six months, yes.

However, people also said that six months ago, and before that. If you recall, HD8000 was the first gen where launch-time open-source support was promised - it didn't exactly turn out that way, and the drivers only became stable/usable a year after launch. I'm pessimistic on that, and would not rely on it matching six months from now.

[grndzro]

The 7850K is probably your best bet
You can undervolt and underclock a bit and it still retains almost all performance.
You should upgrade the ram though no matter what APU you go with.

[grndzro]

A10-6700T can burn 80 watts gaming.
Not sure your old 120W PSU will be up to the task.
You can get a decent higher wattage power supply fairly cheap.

No idea what your budget is but upgrading into a 120W psu with the intention of gaming dosen't sound like a good idea. Especially when your ram will be a serious bottleneck for an APU.

[tomtomme]

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldo...A10-6700T.html

Cpu-world says 1866MHz, but you might want to check AMD's site. There isn't anything planned for r600g as far as I know, and theoretically radeonsi could match it in six months, yes.

However, people also said that six months ago, and before that. If you recall, HD8000 was the first gen where launch-time open-source support was promised - it didn't exactly turn out that way, and the drivers only became stable/usable a year after launch. I'm pessimistic on that, and would not rely on it matching six months from now.

thanks again

those two and many other sites state 2133 mhz... sigh

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/A10-6700T-CPU-258000/

http://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.php/news/hardware/prozessoren/27901-amd-a10-6700t-und-a8-6500t-im-deutschen-handel-gelistet.html

however AMD says 1866 here:

http://www.amd.com/de-de/products/processors/desktop/a-series-apu#

http://products.amd.com/en-gb/DesktopAPUDetail.aspx?id=89&f1=AMD+Quad-Core+A10-Series+APU+for+Desktops&f2=&f3=&f4=4&f5=&f6=&

is this maybe up to the mainboard?
the kaveris also state only 2133 while I definitely saw tests with 2400

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_ddr3_2400mhz&num=1

...

after a long search I found at least a 6800k test on memory scalling

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/memory-scaling-gaming-haswell-richland,3593.html

this states that 2400 mhz was mostly unstable for richland. so 2133 is the deal, but this is officially supported by the 6800k.
however the kaveri 7600 was tested succesfully with 2400 mhz:

http://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/15/exploring-effect-memory-bandwidth-amds-kaveri/

Three questions remaining:
- If I would find 2133 ram similar priced to a 1866 ram with same timings I could at least try this with a supporting mainboard + 6700T?
- And when it does not work out I would just run the 2133 at 1866 mhz and go for optimizing the timings? (the I would think: I should have waited for 7600 kaveri)
- I would go for FM2+ and not for FM2 mainboard?

[tomtomme]

The 7850K is probably your best bet
You can undervolt and underclock a bit and it still retains almost all performance.
You should upgrade the ram though no matter what APU you go with.

I cannot go above 45W with my given case and PSU.
7850k was somewhere tested undervolted/clocked by a bios setting for 45W TDP. However it was then much slower than the 7600 (I believe cpu ran at 2,5 Ghz, gpu I do not remember).
Yes, I think the RAM will be upgraded, despite the tight budget.

[tomtomme]

A10-6700T can burn 80 watts gaming.
Not sure your old 120W PSU will be up to the task.
You can get a decent higher wattage power supply fairly cheap.

No idea what your budget is but upgrading into a 120W psu with the intention of gaming dosen't sound like a good idea. Especially when your ram will be a serious bottleneck for an APU.

thanks for the hint!!!
can you give a refference for this?
is 80 watts common or just a seldom peak in furmark, prime95 or battlefield (stuff I would not run).
in this case I maybe should upgrade to the new 28nm kabini athlon, as it is so cheap, while at the same time keeping the old RAM.
I definitely will not go for a new PSU and/or case. 120 W are the limit.
This will be a machine for LIGHT gaming (humble bundle stuff at 1080p and 30 fps) and XBMC movie time

[tomtomme]

A10-6700T can burn 80 watts gaming.
Not sure your old 120W PSU will be up to the task.
You can get a decent higher wattage power supply fairly cheap.

No idea what your budget is but upgrading into a 120W psu with the intention of gaming dosen't sound like a good idea. Especially when your ram will be a serious bottleneck for an APU.

a quick search yielded that you maybe meant 80 watts for the entire system.
at least this says 76 watts for the system running tomb raider

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-A8-7600-Kaveri-APU-Review-HSA-Arrives/Power-Consumption-and-Conclusions