Just sharing a purchase I made. For $46.98 a low power consumption build motherboard with a laptop processor for desktop, that just needs a Case, RAM, Power Supply, And a Drive with OS ) but able to handle most of my games on steam.
I bought 2 of these 3 weeks ago for low power consumption builds. One of these replaced my wifes Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz and games she plays and streaming media no problems at all. With her build I added a video card thinking she would need a video card upgrade not having trust in an APU for gaming.
However with the build for myself I am running strictly on the APU alone without an added video card and Windows 10 Home 64-bit and it really impressed me that its able to handle most of my games on steam. Even Blades of Time which has lots of complicated detailed graphics and very active FPS / Hack n Slash fight scenes has no lag at all.
I saw that the price that went back to $63.99 and so I decided not to buy a 3rd board.
But looking today I saw that it dropped once again to the price that I paid prior of $44.99 with $1.99 shipping and so I bought a 3rd board.
My daughter has been using my wifes computer lots ever since the new computer build because of the fast performance and her game runs and looks way better with DirectX 11. My wife recently has been complaining that our daughter has been using her computer all the time now and why isnt she using her own. It was found out that our daughter decided to play her Animal Jam game that she use to be happy with on a 8 year old computer on my wifes computer and the game plays fast and looks better and so she is glued to a system that runs the game better and now she knows that she was lagging out on the other she doesnt want to go back to slow gameplay. So I am going to gut her case of the old motherboard and install this in place of it and fortunately I dont have to buy anything else for it since I have some extra 2GB DDR3 1333 Mhz sticks of RAM to give her 4GB RAM and will give her Windows 10 64-bit to try out and see if she liked that, and then will license that at a cost later.
The 2.7Ghz Turbo mode of this APU runs at 2.7Ghz when heavy gaming and I have seen temperatures cap out at 62C in a 68F room. It runs a little warm, but 62C is not a worry for me. I start to worry when I see 70C+, and when idle its 37C and underclocked with the cool n quiet that AMD has and 62C is the cap, thats safe operating temps. It seems to be able to hold 2.7Ghz for extended periods of time and I havent seen any cycling of 1.7 and 2.7Ghz such as 2.7Ghz until it reaches a specific temp and then drops to 1.7Ghz to cool and then back to 2.7Ghz until a temp is reached and then back to 1.7Ghz "thermal throttling for lack of better term", but slightly different than thermal throttling of other CPU/APUs which throttling is a sign of cooling troubles. I expected this build to hold to 1.7Ghz and surge to 2.7Ghz for short bursts to crunch, but it can maintain 2.7Ghz as a constant for gaming in my testing. Perhaps I just havent reached that magic temperature where it then goes into a thermal throttle cycle which I am pretty sure it would protect itself by doing this vs a melt down of the cores.
Now after all the pros I have to share the concerns for would be buyers of this:- The APU was originally intended for a Laptop, but it has been mated with a Desktop motherboard and fan speed is a constant speed. The fan spins fast and its quiet running. The only issue with longevity of this build and concern I have is FAN failure of the APU. I myself can fix for a fan failure easily to replace with similar or same fan, but someone who isnt so technically inclined could feel like this is a throw away board when the cooling fan dies someday it could equal a dead computer for them. There is no heatsink swap like traditional desktop boards where you have a choice of cooling methods. Its what you see is what you get and its not if it will fail but when it will fail. I have seen cooling fans last 20 years as well as them die after just a few months. The fact that its a small high RPM fan means that its prone to failure due to wear. (* The good thing however to offset this con is that it has a 3 year warranty and so if a $47 motherboard+APU combo lasts 3 years without any problems you pretty much got your moneys worth out of it )
- It is an ITX board and so there are some limitations to what can be added.
- While you can upgrade to more RAM or choice of 1333Mhz or 1600Mhz DDR3, the APU is soldered to the board and permanent, so no future upgrade path for this board for a better APU, that is unless you have the tools and skills to upgrade to another mobile APU without destroying the board. Most people will toss the board vs go through that much trouble for a board like this.
- It has a PCI Express 2.0 slot for a video card upgrade, but while this may make for better gaming for games that the APU's internal AMD Radeon HD8510G Graphics GPU may struggle with, then the mobile A8-5545m CPU of the APU can act as a bottleneck to videocard performance, so it should be mentioned that this is not a solution for heavy gaming for people thinking that they can just slam a high end GTX gaming card into it and charge through with playing heavy games. The CPU portion of the APU will most likely act as a bottleneck. *Note: I have Witcher 3 in my steam library and will be testing this game out on the APU. I dont expect this game to play on this APU very well given performance I seen with a Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz with Geforce GT 730 2GB Card.
- The AMD Radeon HD8510G Graphics uses shared memory from system RAM 768MB of it So my system with 4GB RAM reports as 3.2GB FREE for the OS. The BIOS doesnt seem to have a feature to adjust the size of the allocation, or its buried in a menu i haven't found yet. The only way to remove the 768MB shared memory RAM allocation for the internal GPU within the APU is to add on a video card to the PCI Express 2.0 slot which disables the internal GPU of the APU freeing up this memory allocation requirement.
BIOSTAR A68N-5545 AMD A8-5545 (Quad core 1.7G, turbo 2.7G) Processor AMD A70M Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138448
