We take a look at what the A4-3400 APU can offer on a budget platform and decide if it is worthy of your consideration.
Product on Review: AMD A4-3400 APU
Manufacturer and Sponsor: AMD
Street Price: £45inc. VAT (GBP)
There are many people who buy low end desktops and when they do, they hope that they get a rich and hassle free user experience. As CPUs now have arguably reached a competent level in the past few years, the final hurdle was to make the dreaded motherboard IGP obsolete. This is where the A4 Series APUs come in. Low priced dual core CPU clocked at 2.7Ghz paired with a DX11, 160 core Radeon HD 6140D graphics adaptor that promises to deliver performance for the essential and day to day tasks expected of a contemporary desktop PC.
AMD’s Overview of the APU
Do more in less time with energy-efficient desktops. With AMD’s APU, a multicore CPU and discrete-level GPU on a single power-efficient chip, you get the visual performance you need for the best choice for digital entertainment and gaming. With even more compute performance, graphics are crisp, bright and smooth, and content is easy to share.
Features & Specifications
Specifications
Model Name: A4-3400
Radeon™ Brand: HD 6410D
CPU Clock Speed: 2.7GHz
CPU Cores on Die: 2 cores
TDP: 65W
Total L2 Cache: 1MB
Radeon™ Cores on Die: 160
GPU Clock Speed: 600 MHz
DDR3 Speed: 1600MHz
DX11 and UVD3
Instruction Set Extensions MMX(+) 3D Now!(+) SSE 1, 2, 3, 4A, x86-64, AMD-V
Transistor count: 758 Million
Die size: 228mm²
Lithography: 32nm
Features
AMD Quick Stream Technology – Stop waiting for the buffer to catch up – get fast, smooth internet streaming with the powerful APU graphics with AMD Quick Stream Technology.
AMD Steady Video Technology 2.0 – Vacation video shouldn’t make you dizzy – helping to eliminate shaking from home video is only one click away with AMD Steady Video Technology 2.0. Automatically stabilize home and Web video with advanced settings and one click control.
Perfect Picture HD – Images jump off the page and burst into life in vivid color with enhanced resolution and contrast of AMD Perfect Picture HD.
AMD Radeon™ HD Graphics – Get everything you ever wanted out of your graphics – crisp & sharp photos, movies and games with the phenomenal discrete-level performance of AMD Radeon™ HD Graphics.
AMD Internet Acceleration – Get your browsing done quickly with Web sites that load fast with AMD Internet Acceleration.
AMD App Acceleration – Speed up everyday applications with the power of more graphics cores and AMD App Acceleration.
Model Name: A4-3400
Radeon™ Brand: HD 6410D
CPU Clock Speed: 2.7GHz
CPU Cores on Die: 2 cores
TDP: 65W
Total L2 Cache: 1MB
Radeon™ Cores on Die: 160
GPU Clock Speed: 600 MHz
DDR3 Speed: 1600MHz
DX11 and UVD3
Instruction Set Extensions MMX(+) 3D Now!(+) SSE 1, 2, 3, 4A, x86-64, AMD-V
Transistor count: 758 Million
Die size: 228mm²
Lithography: 32nm
Features
AMD Quick Stream Technology – Stop waiting for the buffer to catch up – get fast, smooth internet streaming with the powerful APU graphics with AMD Quick Stream Technology.
AMD Steady Video Technology 2.0 – Vacation video shouldn’t make you dizzy – helping to eliminate shaking from home video is only one click away with AMD Steady Video Technology 2.0. Automatically stabilize home and Web video with advanced settings and one click control.
Perfect Picture HD – Images jump off the page and burst into life in vivid color with enhanced resolution and contrast of AMD Perfect Picture HD.
AMD Radeon™ HD Graphics – Get everything you ever wanted out of your graphics – crisp & sharp photos, movies and games with the phenomenal discrete-level performance of AMD Radeon™ HD Graphics.
AMD Internet Acceleration – Get your browsing done quickly with Web sites that load fast with AMD Internet Acceleration.
AMD App Acceleration – Speed up everyday applications with the power of more graphics cores and AMD App Acceleration.
Die shot of the Llano architecture
The A4-3400 has a little over half the active transistors available on the whole Llano die, having the Radeon core count reduced to 160 from 400 and only two active CPU cores, one would assume that these reductions would be enough however AMD sought to nerf the A4 even more by halving the L2 cache per core from 1MB to 512KB. The IMC is stepped down a gear to natively support memory with a frequency of 1600Mhz, which isn’t too much of an issue as the 160 Radeon cores will be throwing around significantly less data than 320 or the full 400 of them. These reductions bring the A4-3400 APU in with a 65W TDP which means it won’t be getting too hot under the collar and thus small, low profile cooling is adequate enough.
Closer Look: A4-3400 and AMD Memory
APU in-a-box, the retail packaging comes with heatsink with pre-applied thermal paste and does a good job of keeping the APU cool without being too noisy. The box art really does place the green/black of old well in the past.
The accustomed heatspreader shot! The A4-3400 APU posing for the camera.
The AMD Entertainment series memory. The AMD memory profile automatically sets the memory to its rated speed, which eases any hassle of manually setting speeds. This 2x 4GB set is rated for 1600Mhz which makes a perfect match for the A4-3400 APU. These memory modules may look simple due to not having heatspreaders, the truth is, memory doesn’t get that warm and doesn’t really warrant the use of heatspreaders in the first place. It is more of an aesthetic add on that provides some use. To stand out from the croud of budget memory modules, using black PCBs, these modules look very sleek regardless and still stand out. As this RAM is made by PATRIOT, there is little reason to doubt the quality.
Closer Look: GIGABYTE GA-A55M-DS2
GIGABYTE GA-A55M-DS2
The box front gives information about their Ultra Durable 4 standard and mentions the use of a new glass fabric PCB twice. Also mentioned is the use of all solid capacitors and and the various AMD related features. While there is still a lot of information on the box it isn’t too crowded or ghastly.
Quite small on accessories but at just £40-45 there isnt really much to expect other than the essential items, a couple of SATA cables, driver disc, manual and rear I/O plate.
The board itself is not quite mATX @ 244mm x 244mm but is 225mm x 174mm and is in the contemporary blue on dark blue GIGABYTE colours. Though it only has 2 slots for memory, this motherboard can still take upto 32GB of memory. It is a shame that this size motherboard doesn’t recieve more attention. Only a little taller than a mini ITX motherboard with the benefits of having space for 3x PCI slots.
At the top of this board we can see the 4pin CPU power socket and the 3+1 power phases on the left. In the middle we can see the FM1 socket, above this we find the 4pin PWM fan header while below the socket we can find the CMOS battery. Finally on the right we can see the dual channel memory lanes and the 24pin ATX socket.
Moving down to the base of the motherboard we can find the PCIe x16 lane, PCIe x1 and a legacy PCI slot dominating this area. around the outskirts moving left to right we can find the Atheros LAN controller chip, the VIA HD audio chip, Front audio header, another 4pin PWM fan header, COM header, dual BIOS, a pair of USB 2.0 headers each giving another 2x USB ports, the front panel headers and 4x SATA 3Gbps.
The Rear I/O affords 2x PS2 sockets (1x mouse 1x keyboard), D-SUB, DVI-D, 4x USB 2.0, Gigabit lan and 3x audio jacks (Line In/Line Out/Microphone).
The assembled bundle
Test Setup & Overclocking
A75 Setup
APU- AMD A4-3400
Motherboard – GIGABYTE GA-A75M-UD2H
RAM – Team Xtreem PC3 12800 DDR3 1600 7-7-7-21
HDD – Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 7200RPM SATAIII
Power Supply – NZXT Hale82 650W
Cooler – CoolerMaster Hyper 212+
Settings
AMD A4-3400 @ 2.7GHz (100MHz x 27, 1333MHz 9-9-9-24)
HD 6410D integrated graphics
APU- AMD A4-3400
Motherboard – GIGABYTE GA-A75M-UD2H
RAM – Team Xtreem PC3 12800 DDR3 1600 7-7-7-21
HDD – Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 7200RPM SATAIII
Power Supply – NZXT Hale82 650W
Cooler – CoolerMaster Hyper 212+
Settings
AMD A4-3400 @ 2.7GHz (100MHz x 27, 1333MHz 9-9-9-24)
HD 6410D integrated graphics
A55 Setup
APU- AMD A4-3400
Motherboard – GIGABYTE GA-A55M-DS2
RAM – AMD Entertainment Series 2 x 4GB 1600Mhz 9-9-9-24
HDD – Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 7200RPM SATAIII
Power Supply – NZXT Hale82 650W
Settings
AMD A4-3400 @ 2.7GHz (100MHz x 27, 1600MHz 9-9-9-24)
HD 6410D integrated graphics
APU- AMD A4-3400
Motherboard – GIGABYTE GA-A55M-DS2
RAM – AMD Entertainment Series 2 x 4GB 1600Mhz 9-9-9-24
HDD – Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 7200RPM SATAIII
Power Supply – NZXT Hale82 650W
Settings
AMD A4-3400 @ 2.7GHz (100MHz x 27, 1600MHz 9-9-9-24)
HD 6410D integrated graphics
OVERCLOCKING
Unfortunately, the GIGABYTE GA-A55M-DS2 did not take too well to bumps in base frequency. While the APU was able to boot in and remain stable at higher clocks, there were other system instabilities including LAN and memory issues. For this reason, I have omitted overclocked results. Overclocking the GPU alone to 900MHz appeared to give no extra benefit on the GIGABYTE GA-A55M-DS2 so it would be safe to conclude that overclocking, while possible, is pointless on this motherboard. Considering the price of the system it is not a real loss. However, there is little reason why not to give the integrated graphics 1GB over the default 512MB when you are running 8GB of ram.
Power Consumption
It’s interesting to note the power consumption across all motherboards because energy results can fluctuate between manufacturers due to the features and specifications that are integrated. First of all, for the idle tests the system is cold booted into Windows and no additional applications are executed – the watts are noted on the external energy monitor we use. Then the system is loaded with LinX 0.6.4 and MSI Kombustor simultainiously – watts are again monitored throughout the period of testing and the highest and lowest rated watts are then noted down. This stress is an EXTREME loading and represents Peak energy use. Below are the results of this energy test.
Synthetic Benchmarks: AIDA64
Memory Tests
Memory bandwidth benchmarks (Memory Read, Memory Write, Memory Copy) measure the maximum achiveable memory data transfer bandwidth. The code behind these benchmark methods are written in Assembly and they are extremely optimized for every popular AMD and Intel processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x86, MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2 or SSE4.1 instruction set extension.
The Memory Latency benchmark measures the typical delay when the CPU reads data from system memory. Memory latency time means the penalty measured from the issuing of the read command until the data arrives to the integer registers of the CPU.
The Memory Latency benchmark measures the typical delay when the CPU reads data from system memory. Memory latency time means the penalty measured from the issuing of the read command until the data arrives to the integer registers of the CPU.
In the main we can see the system benefitting from the faster memory.
CPU Queen Benchmark
This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example — with HyperThreading disabled — the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.
CPU Photoworxx Benchmark
This benchmark stresses the integer arithmetic and multiplication execution units of the CPU and also the memory subsystem. Due to the fact that this test performs high memory read/write traffic, it cannot effectively scale in situations where more than 2 processing threads used. For example, on a 8-way Pentium III Xeon system the 8 processing threads will be “fighting” over the memory, creating a serious bottleneck that would lead to as low scores as a 2-way or 4-way similar processor based system could achieve. CPU PhotoWorxx test uses only the basic x86 instructions, and it is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware.
FPU Mandel Benchmark
This benchmark measures the double precision (also known as 64-bit) floating-point performance through the computation of several frames of the popular “Mandelbrot” fractal. The code behind this benchmark method is written in Assembly, and it is extremely optimized for every popular AMD, Intel and VIA processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x87, SSE2, AVX or FMA4 instruction set extension. FPU Mandel test is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware.
Synthetic Benchmarks: x264 HD
Simply put, this test measures how fast your machine can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality x264 video clip. What’s x264, you ask? It’s more or less the next-generation Xvid/DivX codec. I think it’s ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process, and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently.
Synthetic Benchmarks: Cinebench 11.5
CPU Rendering
CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. This test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects which in turn contain more than 300,000 polygons in total, and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is displayed in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.
Open GL Graphics Rendering
This procedure uses a complex 3D scene depicting a car chase (by renderbaron) which measures the performance of your graphics card in OpenGL mode. The performance depends on various factors, such as the GPU processor on your hardware, but also on the drivers used. The graphics card has to display a huge amount of geometry (nearly 1 million polygons) and textures, as well as a variety of effects, such as environments, bump maps, transparency, lighting and more to evaluate the performance across different disciplines and give a good average overview of the capabilities of your graphics hardware.
Synthetic Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA 2012
SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but I believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed. We will be considering – CPU, memory and GPGPU tests.
Synthetic Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA 2012 cont…
Synthetic Benchmarks: 3DMark Vantage & 3DMark 11
3DMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage is the industry standard performance benchmark for DirectX 10 gaming PCs. It includes two graphics tests, two CPU tests and six feature tests. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark Vantage is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 10 under game-like loads.
3DMark 11
Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.
Synthetic Benchmarks: PCMark 7 & UNIGINE Heaven 2.5
UNIGINE Heaven 2.5
Unigine’s benchmark is to showcase the benefits of DX 11 and the use of tessellation as opposed to normal rendering techniques. The demo has impressive visuals that give an insight into what we can expect from gaming in the future.
PCMark 7
PCMark 7 is a tool provided by FutureMark that tests the PCs ability in general office and everyday use. It produces a number that reflects the all-round performance of the PC and is useful to compare between differing setups. For more information, visit the FutureMark website.
Game Benchmarks: AVP, Deus Ex:HR, Shogun 2
Alien Vs. Predator
Spawned from the popular Alien and Predator franchises, Rebellion have collaborated to bring the legendary war to us through the medium of a first-person shooter. The game forces you to hunt, prey and most importantly survive in the swamp colony of Freya’s prospect as a Predator, Alien or Marine. The stunning visuals add to the sense of dread and terror that we have become so accustomed to seeing with the series.
The stand-alone Alien VS Predator benchmark tool was used for testing here. All the settings were set to very high and Tessellation was applied. The average FPS was recorded at the end.
The stand-alone Alien VS Predator benchmark tool was used for testing here. All the settings were set to very high and Tessellation was applied. The average FPS was recorded at the end.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
You play Adam Jensen, an ex-SWAT specialist who’s been handpicked to oversee the defensive needs of one of America’s most experimental biotechnology firms. Your job is to safeguard company secrets, but when a black ops team breaks in and kills the very scientists you were hired to protect, everything you thought you knew about your job changes.
Shogun 2
In the darkest age of Japan, endless war leaves a country divided. It is the middle of the 16th Century in Feudal Japan. The country, once ruled by a unified government, is now split into many warring clans. Ten legendary warlords strive for supremacy as conspiracies and conflicts wither the empire. Only one will rise above all to win the heart of a nation as the new shogun…The others will die by his sword.
It was interesting to note the performance difference between a GPU limited game (being DX:HR) and a CPU limited game (shogun 2). Dropping the settings to minimum, Deus Ex was very playable @ 1280×720 resolution with room to even bump up some options if needed, where as Shogun 2 was really struggling with just the dual core and didn’t gain much performance moving down to the DX9 Balanced benchmark.
Conclusion
The A4-3400 APU provides a good user experience for office, internet and multi media tasks with little fault. I came across no real issue through my day to day tasks and I was happy to find that it could even play Killing Floor at max settings with an average of 56FPS with some drops to 25FPS (1920×1080!!). It is true that this Entry level Desktop APU is not really for gaming but what it does do, is offer a capable computing solution that is versatile enough to provide a modern PC experience.
As a bundle, the GIGABYTE motherboard offers on par performance with its A75 brother and the AMD memory is a good choice to be used with this platform as it gives ease of setup to the user. Though the quality of the motherboard is not in question, it does feel that the options the A55 chipset motherboards offer is limited and unappealing, not many take full use of the 6x SATA 2.0 ports available on the Hudson D2, preferring to offer just 4, nor do they take full advantage of the 14x USB 2.0 available. I see little reason why someone should chose the A55 platform over the A75. While the direct competitor to this bundle is the Intel H61 platform with a G620 pentium, let’s not forget that the new B75 platform is available from Intel for little over the cost of what you would pay for an A55 motherboard.
Overall if you are looking for a budget build and are happy to trade off a little CPU performance for a boost in the GPU department, the A4-3400 offers low power, dual core goodness with entry level discrete graphics that enriches modern computing needs by accelerating applications, internet browsing and video playback, giving it the responsive performance that people have come to expect from a modern desktop PC.
Pros.
+ Price
+ Discrete class integrated graphics
+ Low Power
Cons.
– Not ideal for gaming
– Increasing competition
+ Price
+ Discrete class integrated graphics
+ Low Power
Cons.
– Not ideal for gaming
– Increasing competition
Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net. Thanks to AMD for providing today’s review sample.
