Hey folks,

i recently built a PC for my little brother who still goes to school and had a tight budget. (and saved the money he had for over a year. oh snaps.)  i was waiting for the Kaveri APU's to hit, because they sounded like a great thing, however we ran out of patience, and i decided to buy a Pentium g3420 and a 7790 instead...

.. and holy damn i couldnt have done any better. because looking at Benchmarks, Kaveri is vastly inferior in terms of graphics in comparison to entry level graphics. (such as the 7770, 7790). and given the fact that you, looking at newegg prices (as well as german prices), you pay 10 bucks more for a huge leap in performance, i DO NOT GET why Kaveri is even a thing. (Kaveri is 140€ or 189ish USD, while you can grab a Pentium g3220/g3420 (50ish€/80ish$) + a 7790 (a little over 100$/€ right now) for around 10-20 bucks more. )

While the 7850k is a nice step up from the a10 6800k ON PAPER, the gain in games is tiny, and if you are planning on doing only CPU heavy stuff, the i5 is just Aeons better. (and has an integrated gpu, so you aint needing a dedicated one.)

So yeah, i really wanted to like this thingy because i think APUs are cool, but in terms of bang for the buck, the a10 6800k is superior, and in terms of raw computing/graphics prowess, other solutions just make way more sense due to not saving much money buying this particular APU.

any opinions on this? i really wanna get kicked to the face, missing some extremely obvious benefit, but i really cant find one. 

Whilst AMD are pushing the cheap/low end graphics thing, I think the APU's are really designed for GPGPU and should conform to the new OpenCL standards. AMD know their CPU's are miles behind Intel so they're banking on their GPU tech and OpenCL taking off in the future to offset this performance deficit.

That's the impression I get at least.

Edit: Btw, the integrated graphics on the Intel chips is miles behind the graphics in the AMD APUs so you would definitely need a dedicated GPU if you went with an i5

yeah i know and agree, i played on my i3's GPU for a while (even though games like LOL and Game Dev Story actually worked well), however if you need a PC only for CPU heavy stuff, i still recommend the i5 standalone versus any APU from AMD right now.  

(on a side note, Intel IRIS graphics seem to be quite promising.)

edit: the term GPGPU is unfamiliar to me, is it this Hybrid Crossfire thing where you pair an APU with a Graphics card? THats a cool thing indeed, i confess. (i guess i need to check some benchmarks before commenting any further. only thing is that the selection of GPU's seems to be fairly limited.)

I think you did the right thing...I've just recently built similar rig for my nephew, I find that's the best possible combo right now.

oh god looking up gpgpu makes me feel like a retard. *does investigate it further*

@HoloDust: yeah i am really happy with the results, for not even 400$ spent total (and i even went with all HQ parts!). we immediately installed things like Metro 2033, Hawken and TERA, and all of those games ran quite well on high/highest settings, which is what i wanted to achieve. i also really like the Haswell Pentium. it seems to be a nice little entry CPU.

I think the concept of gpgpu is quite simply. Use gpu's to do general purpose computing normally done by cpu's.

It's because Kaveri is new and not much more powerful than Richland. The predecessor definitely has the upper hand in price/power ratio.

good for a small pc

You get a $150 i3 and an $80 HD 7730 for $180. How is that a rip off?

EDIT:  The pentium is gonna majorly bottleneck that system...

The point of AMD kaveri is to accelerate GPGPU workloads in cases where benefits may be seen with low latency access towards the GPU with moderate amount of concurrency happening in a program.

The problem that arises with AMD kaveri is that there is almost no software developers willing to take advantage of it but I suspect some things will change once openCL 2.0 arrives to the scene.

All in all it doesn't make sense right now and I doubt software developers will be taking advantage of it any time soon so even in the short term it still I would still say that it does not make any sense.