AMD Athlon 5350 APU and AM1 Review and test

#5334735 Posted on: 09/14/2016 06:26 PM

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Media boxes for older TV's but why pay £100's when a £30 external HDD will do the same & in most cases a better job ? ? ?

#5334742 Posted on: 09/14/2016 06:38 PM

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Because I wanted more than just tv shows. I wanted entertainment! These really don't need a whole lot either, I think I spent maybe $150 at the most on each box?

#5334964 Posted on: 09/15/2016 09:57 AM

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Thanks for reminding me about this article. I actually bought one of these (and an MSI board) a month ago for a home server. It was the only CPU that met all of my demands:
* A system that runs below 30W when idle (currently, the whole PC uses 29W)
* Can be passively cooled
* RAID support
* Cost effective
* Preferably x86 (ARM works for most of the vast majority of my needs, but not 100% of them)

I would've gone with the Athlon 5150, but it operates at the same voltage as the 5350 (which in itself has a higher-than-necessary voltage) and I wasn't aware of any motherboards that supported undervolting, so the 5350 became the more sensible choice.

I'd have much rather bought an ARM platform but there aren't any reasonably priced ones that support RAID. I'd have been fine with getting one with a PCIe x1 slot and use a RAID card, but I wasn't aware of driver availability. There are x86 compatibility layers for ARM so in the event I needed to run x86 software, I wouldn't have been completely left out.

Going Intel didn't have anything competitive unless I paid double what I already paid. For the same price point, Intel's offerings would have had a system with roughly equal CPU performance, would've lacked multiple PCIe slots, may have lacked USB 3.0, a worse IGP, roughly equal idling wattage, and slightly better load wattage. IIRC, the 5350 is Excavator based, but each core is independent rather than being in a module. As a result, it's actually really competitive against Intel, clock-per-clock. Still worse, but not much.

They're good little CPU's.

I've got one in the PC I built for my 8yd old.

She only watches Kodi / Netflix and does Mathletics and Reading Eggs so just needed something basic.

Only cost me $75 AUD for the mobo & CPU and I already had everything else I needed for the build laying around.

I could have gone with Intel's J2800/2900, etc but it would have cost almost double the AMD setup

#5335061 Posted on: 09/15/2016 03:37 PM

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Only cost me $75 AUD for the mobo & CPU and I already had everything else I needed for the build laying around.

I could have gone with Intel's J2800/2900, etc but it would have cost almost double the AMD setup
Damn looks like you actually got a pretty decent deal (at least when you consider Australia tends to be more expensive, and that 1 AUD is 0.75 USD as of writing). I paid slightly over $100 USD for my build, though I also got 4GB of RAM. I probably don't even need 2GB, but I wanted this to be as power efficient as possible so I figured I may as well just buy 1 stick that has more than I'll ever need.

I too pretty much had all the parts I needed lying around for this (including parts for RAID).

#5335329 Posted on: 09/16/2016 10:15 AM

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Damn looks like you actually got a pretty decent deal (at least when you consider Australia tends to be more expensive, and that 1 AUD is 0.75 USD as of writing). I paid slightly over $100 USD for my build, though I also got 4GB of RAM. I probably don't even need 2GB, but I wanted this to be as power efficient as possible so I figured I may as well just buy 1 stick that has more than I'll ever need.

I too pretty much had all the parts I needed lying around for this (including parts for RAID).

Yeah, I managed to get it on a combo sale, wasn't a huge discount but it was still around 20% from memory.

I threw in my old 8GB RAM kit, old 120GB SSD and old GTX 560 so it's a lot more than what she needs but should be enough to last her a few years. She's in year 3 at school and if this will last her until she gets to year 7 I'll be very happy, since they need laptops starting then.