AMD unleashed Ryzen before this year and it's been happy times for enthusiasts ever since. Budget shoppers recently received the quad-core Ryzen 3 models while those on truly tight budgets have been holding out for the APUs which integrate both a CPU and GPU under ane roof.

The first moving ridge of these new APUs are known past the codename "Bristol Ridge" and while they practise indeed support the new AM4 platform, they aren't what many believed (or at least hoped) they would be.

These aren't Zen-based APUs, which probably won't make it till some fourth dimension next yr. What nosotros have here are Excavator-based CPU cores, or a refined Bulldozer architecture, and I am using the word "refined" rather loosely here. The A12-9800 for example sports four Excavator cores alongside a generically named Radeon R7 GPU which features 512 stream processors.

Although Bristol Ridge was released through OEMs belatedly terminal year, it recently became available on the retail marketplace and this has excited many of you. The A12-9800 now costs $110 and along with promising pretty decent integrated graphics performance, you lot can take reward of it on a new AM4 motherboard, such as those sporting the B350 chipset.

There is as well a much cheaper and equally pop version without the integrated GPU called the Athlon X4 950 and at $60 people accept already started snapping them upwardly. However the less impulsive buyers amongst you have been desperately asking the states to check these new AM4 parts out to run across if there any adept, so allow's do that...

Let's get this out of the mode right off the bat: for now, the Bristol Ridge range just supports upwards to DDR4-2400 memory. Right now at that place is merely no way to set the memory speed higher, at least on all the motherboards I tried. Memory performance was ever a large event for the Bulldozer architecture and afterwards numerous revisions it was still rather pathetic compared to the Intel contest. Hither we run into the G4560 pushing more than twice the bandwidth of the A12-9800. Proceed in mind this APU has to also feed an integrated GPU with that measly 11.2GB/due south bandwidth, pretty tragic stuff that is.

Side by side up we accept Cinebench R15 which is a good synthetic criterion for gauging how powerful a CPUs single and multi-thread performance really is. Equally you can come across the dual-core Pentium G4560 has no trouble hosing the A12-9800 in both the unmarried and multi-threaded tests and it'southward clocked quite a flake lower. Yep, this is all looking very Bulldozerish to me so far.

PCMark 10 throws a number of common productivity workloads at the system and here we can see the individual scores for the writing and spreadsheets tests. Fifty-fifty these bones tasks nowadays a existent claiming for the quad-core APU.

Don't even bother with content creation. Here the G4560 outscored the A12-9800 by past a massive 64% margin. Dual-cores dominion and old Excavator-based CPUs drool...

Moving on nosotros tried out the Monte Carlo simulation workload and in this exam AMD's new APU continue us waiting for almost sixteen seconds or 64% longer than the G4560.

Looking to encode on a budget? Well then become the Ryzen iii 1200 because it was 150% faster for the aforementioned price. You'll need a inexpensive GPU just that shouldn't be an issue for more twice the CPU firepower.

The A12-9800 too took 46% longer than the G4560 in the Corona criterion and 52% longer than the R3 1200.

The A12-9800's Blender results aren't actually that bad as information technology crush the G4560, though it has to be said the G4560 puts in a poor showing in this test. The APU was notwithstanding 46% slower than the Ryzen three 1200.

If you're buying the A12-9800 for a cheap video creation rig, I hope you're just making minute-long skits because our ane minute and 30 2d video took roughly xiii minutes to render.