Finals Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
So this was my first rendezvous with Carrizo, an architecture that was released for the mobile platform being more energy efficient, it now has moved towards the Athlon X4 range. I have to say it, I have mixed feeling here as performance wise it is more of the same we've seen for years now. Energy efficiency wise the setup idles at roughly 60 Watts, and considering there is no active GPU inside this processor I still find that to be on the high side. The conundrum of that problem is a lacking IGP, we are required to add a dedicated graphics cards and that component alone is adding and pushing upwards the overall wattage by at least 10 Watts (idle). Performance wise you get what you pay for, it's a 69 USD quad-core processor, the per core performance is at the level of AMDs APUs and that means it's half the IPC performance Intel offers per core. So again nothing changed. This does take a bit of a downfall with content creation, the 2MB L2 cache seems to be the culprit here, then again we doubt you had planned to build an Athlon X4 system for content creation with heavy CPU workloads.
Product stack
No what I need to do in this conclusion is to place the product into the right stack and purpose, for 69 USD you will retrieve a product that is capable to manage pretty much anything you want to do on an entry level PC. And that really is what this is all about, add a nice SSD, a funky little motherboard, some 2133 MHz memory and a mainstream to entry level graphics card and you can actually game at 1080P quite well. So that is the thesis here, an 'entry level PC' under say 400 USD. At 65 Watt you do get 4 logical CPU cores running at just over 3.5 GHz, and that remains to be impressive in Windows 10 as the overall OS experience is plenty fast for you everyday work and browsing.
Concluding
Despite taking a seat in the lower segment of all benchmrks I will still recommend the Athlon X4 845, but you do need to understand the product and its positioning. If you need to build a PC for somebody that merely browses the web, or plays light-games then really at this price the Athlon X4 845 is just great value for money. it's still a 3.8 Boostable quad-core processor. However, it is time for the new stuff as AMD will need to step away from this IPC perf fast, the world is advancing fast and Intel has been way too comfortable in their position for years now. Strip away high-end and mainstream gaming rig from your mindset and understand what AMD is bringing to the table with Carrizo, then you should be impressed as you can build a very cheap functional PC that is fast enough for everyday functionality. If you purchase a Athlon X4 845 with the combination of that 50 USD FM2 motherboard, you'll have a processor, 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. Your most expensive part would however be the graphics cards, as you are required to purchase one. The Athlon X4 845 is hard to beat in terms of price versus performance, it is an affordable quad-core processor that will functions excellent and excel in an entry-level Windows 10 PC. Mainstream and higher classed gamers however will need to look elsewhere as the CPU is just too under-powered. For the right audience, sure recommended. But please do keep in mind at what kind of usage this platform is focused okay ?
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