Setup and Errata

The APUs were installed in the Asus Crosshair Ranger FM2+/A88X motherboard.  Windows 10 was freshly installed with the latest drivers and updates.  Installation was smooth and I ran into no issues.  The OS was installed on a SSD while games and benchmarks sat on a 1 TB spinning hard drive.  Power was measured from the wall so it included all components.

The chips were tested without a discrete graphics card since all chips in testing featured integrated graphics.  I tested the AMD parts against the previous “Kaveri” based A10-7850K, the older Intel i3-4330, and finally the new i3-6100.  The AMD parts and the i3-4330 were tested with 8 GB of DDR-3 while the i3-6100 featured 16 GB DDR-4 of memory.  The extra memory should not directly impact results as none of the benchmarks and games took up 16 GB, much less the 8 GB of the other solutions.

The i3-4330 used the Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD5H.  This is an older board, but was introduced with the Haswell architecture several years ago.  It still features many modern connections and is a fast and stable motherboard.  The i3-6100 uses the GA-Z170X-UD5.  This is a cutting edge board with all of the latest bells and whistles that we come to expect with a modern motherboard (M.2, PCI-E 3.0, USB 3.1, etc.).

Components

Asus Crosshair Ranger-2 x 4GB Radeon DDR-3 2133

Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD5H- 2 x 4GB GSkill DDR-3 1866

Gigabyte GA-787X-UD5- 2 x 8GB GSkill DDR-4 2400

Samsung 500 GB 850 EVO SSD

Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB HD

Lite-On BD Reader

Corsair TX750W Power Supply

Windows 10 64 Bit

Catalyst 16.4.1 Drivers

Intel Graphics Drivers 15.40

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