Finals Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
If you place the product into the right stack and purpose, then the AM1 based Athlon and Sempron FS1b solution can be a big hit as far as I am concerned. Now you need to understand that these are 25 Watt processors .. yeah .. 25 Watt ! And for that low power envelope you will retrieve a product that is capable to manage pretty much anything you want to do on an entry level PC. This line right here 'entry level PC' is not even what this solution is about. AM1 / FS1b solutions are golden for net-tops, media servers and HTPCs and make an excellent NAS or file server. Heck, what about a download station ? At 25 Watts you can leave it on all day.
The trick is that with this APU solution AMD offers everything a modern age PC can offers, just with lower performance. As shown, your SSD will still run 500 MB/sec brining you snazzy and fast application loads, your audio will still sound great, you can playback FullHD DXVA accelerated content and so on. So yeah, it might not be fast PC, but pop in some memory and you'll even work with photoshop perfectly fine. The downside obviously remains poor processor performance, but again .. at 25 Watt you got 4 logical CPU cores running at just over 2 GHz, and that remains to be impressive at that power envelope.
The Platform Overall
The Kabini based AM1 / FS1b solutions as such will offer tremendous value for money. AMD is savvy with the embedded GPU and can spin-off many functions from that GPU to accelerate it. Combined with the AM1 chipset you will gain features like a SATA-600 and USB 3.0 support. Also a very powerful Catalyst based software suite surrounding AMDs APUs definitely brings heaps of advantages to them opposed to the competition. Remember, the Athlon 5350 APU offers decent enough CPU performance, nice multi-media options, the Full HD experience and sure, even gaming albeit very low level due to the 128 shader processors.
Concluding
Strip away high-end and mainstream gaming rig from your mindset and understand what AMD is bringing to the table with Kabini, then you should be impressed as at 25 Watts you can build a very cheap functional PC that is even OK in performance for everyday usage as well. These Kabini based AM1 / FS1b APUs are pretty sexy for a HTPC or small form factor functionality. All these Athlon and Sempron processors even get 128 Shader processors with GCN GPU architecture. If you purchase a kabini APU with the combination of that AM1 motherboard, you'll have a processor, graphics subsystem, two SATA-600 ports, USB 3.0, heaps of USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, HD audio and you simply get a very up-to-date platform that you can utilize for some fun or functional stuff.
As such the Kabini APU will be will be hard to beat in terms of features and overall performance, it is an excellent and affordable APU for a HTPC or a low level Windows 8.1 PC. Gamers however will need to look elsewhere popping in a dedicated graphics card is possible, yet the CPU is just too under-powered and the PCie slot maxes out at x4. So, yeah, low-level Atom like performance with way more features and an upgradable APU socket design really make the AM1 platfrom complete. At 25 Watts we take of our hat and bow, we really do like Kabini based AM1 / FS1b solutions. But please do keep in mind at what kind of usage this platform is focused okay ?
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