Hey guys, i want to ask if it is more worth it to get the the A10 and use integrated graphics or Intel pentium G820 with an AMD radeon 7750. The pentium setup is a little bit cheaper than the AMD setup.
Well the AMD APU has the equivilant of 7660 in, but is a Quad Core
Though the Intel setup allows you to change to a different 1155 socket CPU later on if more CPU grunt is required.
If your looking for the greater GPU power, go with the intel setup. Although the AMD may run as well as the intel setup based on the fact that it has more cores at its dispossal!
The A10 is a beastly CPU/GPU for the price. But buy it, and you'll have to get a motherboard for it, and the right ram type, and in the future when you need more everything will need to be replaced. So if I were you, I'd go Intel on this one. Save yourself a bit of money and get an sandy or ivy bridge though, it'll last longer and most motherboards are actually cheaper with the 1155 socket.
Pentium G820? Is that a typo? If you can get any pentium dual core and a 7750 cheaper than an A10($120), than go for it. Right now, on Newegg I see the cheapest pentium ($65) and cheapest 7750 ($105) selling for $170 ($150 with rebate).
sorry, i meant the G860.
I'd go with the A10 unless you won't have any money for any upgrades for some time. A Pentium setup with a HD 7750 will give you greater initial in game performance, but any upgrades are very clunky. The A10 performs comparitively to the Intel i3 chips and unlike Intel's lower tier chips (Pentium and i3s) the A10 is very overclockable.
If you go with the A10 and work off the integrate graphics (which btw are perfectly fine outside of the most demanding games) for a good long time, then when you feel like you should upgrade, you can simply drop a Hd 7850 or similar and you'll be miles ahead in performance with a very efficient upgrade path. With the Pentium + discrete method, you'll have to toss the HD 7750 (which you sunk a good bit of your budget into) in favor of the new HD 7850 (or w/e). Additionally, the Pentium is a very gimped chip, so you may find its performance outside of games to be very lack luster.
Additionally, the idea that you can upgrade the Pentium to an i5 when you have the money due to the LGA 1155 socket is somewhat flawed as you will be holding back the potential of the i5 chip with a low end mobo that you would end up with going for a cheap Pentium build, thus you'd realistically need to replace the mobo as well, invalidating the advantage the LGA 1155 socket gave you to begin with.
That is very true cloudscorpion, thank you. Also i heard that the FM2 socket will be continued for a while.
This is a awesome topic that deserves more attention as i3's and pentium chips get tossed aside for 4 cores even though they are just as fast as the 4 cores. The chip usually with the strongest card wins, that is until you start comparing intel vs amd. Here is a bench in games of the A10 vs the G850(slower then your planned chip), scroll to the bottom for the game performance(stock clocks) : http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/404?vs=675 As you can see the pentium walks all over the A10, not by a little either, by A LOT!
Now let us get to OC performance, ultimately that is the game changer for the AMD guys as they can overclock their low end processors and gain leads. Here is a A10 @ 4.4ghz vs a G850 at stock clocks in single threaded performance benchmark: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6347/50408.png Games love fast cores vs more cores even to this day, add a capable card and you have a nice gaming rig.
When it comes down to this build, the A10 or the G860/7750, for gaming right now without any plans for upgrading for the future i would go G860/7750 mainly because it will defeat the A10 in gaming(obviously the 7750 is the reason). You can run i5's on low end boards just fine(H61 and H67 for example) , you do not get overclocking but why would you need to OC an i5 when at stock clocks there is no game that causes issues with it(if there is a game that is out now that does, show me the benchmarks/video of the i5 struggling).
I see a lot of folks putting the low end intel's down mainly over the fact that they are dual core and can not be overclocked, but the proof is in the results that even these dual core low end chips compete directly with overclocked AMD quad cores. My sandy i3 plays every game as well as my 1100T, everything from minecraft to Skyrim Dead space 2 etc) all maxed out.
Well lets just break this down bit by bit:
There is a reason that the Pentium and i3 chips are losing favor to other chips, while they have favorable single core performance, they are starting to become a relic of the past. Simply put, programmers are starting to make better programs. We have access to an assortment of libraries and subsystems that make multi-threaded processing easier and more ideal when we design our programs. The video game industry is one of the heavy processing segments that are lagging behind the most when it comes to adopting multi-threaded programming architectures, simply because it isn't as immediately intuitive when designing a system that will simulate a game enviorment. But this is changing, faster than you may think, most big dev games these days target quad core CPUs and thus design their game engines to distribute their loads amungst at least four threads at a time. Most heavy processing programs already make heavy use of multiple threads, if you look at those benchmarks you posted you'll see almost all of them the A10 is doing better if not significantly better. I can't honestly, with good consience, recommend single or dual core chips very often anymore, simply because as time goes on these chips will become significantly less optimal as our programs become more and more advanced, thus lessening their potential time of usefullness.
Now when you state that Intel's low core chips are "as fast as" the A10 chips which isn't really true, for them to be as fast in a true sense, their cores would need to be able to compute twice as much information in the same time as the A10's cores, which they don't even get close to doing. That said, they do have better single core performance at stock, but again, this is also a slightly less than fair comparison, as the A10's have an OC potential that the Pentium and i3 simply don't have. Overclocking has honestly become fairly mainstream, and there are plenty of walkthroughs and tools that make a reasonable OC job a fairly simple procedure. The difference of course, comes from the chosen programs, older or less advanced programs are less capable at utilizing multiple cores, thus the processing advantage held by the A10 dimishes. Though again, this is a trend that will dimish quickly as multicore processing is one of the most saught after advancements in programming today and it holds a plethera of advantages, not only for multicore CPUs, but also pushing loads to GPUs (which if you don't know, are pretty much based on parallel processing, not just by 4 or 8, but by hundreds or thousands of shader cores) or pushing to cloud based processing (which is a much more distributed model). Video games are lagging behind mostly because they can be, most games are not CPU heavy and are significantly more reliant on GPUs for their performance. Thus older and less advanced (or simply poorly programmed) games will prefer fast single core perfomance over multicore CPUs, but this is a dimishing trend, quad cores are the norm and the target platform now. Almost anything outside of (some) games and itunes will prefer the multicore performance of the A10 over the higher single core performance of the Pentium, and this is before taking OC into account.
Lastly, yes, you can put an i5 chip into a cheap mobo, your not going to run into issues, but you will gimp it as the board may not support some of the features the i5 can take advantage of and definately won't be able to take advantage of the i5's very impressive OC capabilities. Honestly, to buy a sexy i5 3570k and stick it in something that simply won't OC should be a crime, wasting such glorious potential.
Thank you for the reply sir, that is a proper response and i appreciate it. Thank you for taking your time and dropping some proper knowledge on me, i'll read it until i understand all that you wrote and if i can come back with any points/questions i'll post here again! I wish there were more threads like this in here, discussing processors and graphics cards in as much detail as possible.
Cheers and Happy Holidays!
" As you can see the pentium walks all over the A10, not by a little either, by A LOT!" ???? the pentium only beats it in 4 catagorys and not by much.. also there is know indication of what their test set up is.
i would say to look at this http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/46073-amd-a10-5800k-trinity-needs-faster-ram/?page=3
In future referances, wouldn't the A10-5800k be better with good RAM+ another GPU in CrossFire?
For gaming the A10 is crap even with a 6670 in cross fire a 7750 on its own will beat it. An as far as cpu is concerned again the G860 beats it for gaming and thats not changing anytime soon.