No, this is not the typical “which $$$$ GPU” thread 
Recently I upgraded the APU in my desktop. But the system also has a GPU from the main competitor. So, here’s the question: do I use the APU (AMD R7 on A10-PRO 8750B) or discrete GPU (nVidia GT710). Elaborate on your choice.
Use case: web, mail, 2D RTS games, video playback (YT & locally stored various media formats)
OS: Devuan (Debian w/o systemd). For both options, drivers are available and working.
I never owned an A10, but wasn’t it’s main sell, the fact that 2/3’rds of the chip is GPU/
You might be able to tell us, but if the APU plays video well, whith out using too much system ram, or causing I/O disruption, then the 710 is redundant?
Yes, the 8750B has 4 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores. So in a way the GT710 is indeed redundant, but I wonder which is the better choice for video output.
(I have trouble with video playback, on both GPU’s but I’ve dropped that issue with the Devuan people in their forum)
PS: the old CPU/APU was an A8-5600K, with R6 video. At the time nVidia Linux support was superior to AMD/ATI’s offerings, so the choice wasn’t too difficult Things have changed 
IIRC, the A10 was advertised as being able to run BF3 at 1080 on windows, when launched.
Even with potato fps, i’m surprised it struggles with video.
Is it just on 4gigs of stock 1333mhz ram?
Not really Mainboard: Gigabyte F2A88X-D3H, 4x 8GB DDR3-1333 RAM, Samsung 850 EVO 120GB SSD. Previous APU (A8-5600K) played 2 video streams concurrently perfectly fine, using different players. Really the only thing changed is the APU.
Fair play.
Seems a shame/waste though.
Looks like there might be a potential for improvement with the APU, but the effort to investigate and improve it might not be worth the simpler solution of just using the GT card.
I was wondering of memory squeze was an issue, but that can’t be with so much memory available. The only thing I would try is a stick of faster ram, or a fresh install, but again, I don’t see much effort paying off.
I don’t see any logical reason why faster RAM would change anything in the behaviour of the chip. (and I don’t have it anyway ) Even at 1333 the biggest bottleneck is located between the keyboard and chair As the issue manifests itself as a random freeze of the entire system on video playback there are 2 options: a recent update of the tree (this is Linux!) rendered the drivers unstable or the CPU/GPU is faulty. I have strong doubts on the former, so my suspicions are rising on the latter. Oh well, bought in China, I shouldn’t be too surprised (which I’m not, really) 
vis a vis the ram speed, the GPU side would use the main memory for caching, and I’m pretty sure GPU’s really take advantage of faster ram for it’s buffering/caching (hence GDDR6 and HBM2)
But it should not really affect Just video.
Curious which RTS game you are playing? OpenRA perhaps?
FYI: Widelands & OpenTTD
Yeah, I’m a boring s0d, I know
Quick update on the chip issue: it appears a specific package (with AMD microcode) wasn’t installed. I’m not convinced it solves the issue, but so far I’ve been able to play back videos that previously resulted in crashes. Also, I’ve removed the GT710 card (at least for now) to see how the APU holds up. During a number of failed boots the kernel complained about ECC memory (or rather lack thereof) so I reduced the RAM to 1x 8GB and so far it appears to hold. I may add another stick to have dual-channel memory again.
Well, the chip issue is pretty much resolved now: PEBKAC! (DOH!)
I’d forgotten to update the BIOS and the old version didn’t support the new APU. 
At the same time, I’ve made the decision to keep the nVidia card out and run on the iGPU instead.
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