I've been running an Athlon 5350 as my main rig now for a couple of weeks. I'm not poor--I'm just cheap. You can game on the integrated graphics, as long as you don't expect much and don't go past 1280x1024. It never uses more than about 35 watts total even under serious stress. It also has 4 lanes of PCI-Express 2.0 to which you can connect a graphics card and the results I've seen so far indicate that it isn't bottlenecking a discrete graphics card at lower resolutions.

Several parts of that bundle seem extremely overkill and don't exploit the advantages of the platform. 500w PSU? The base config wouldn't even get to 60w, tops. Azza gaming case? For an embedded system? o_O

These would go great in a slim case with an FSP 300w SFX PSU. Maybe they want to offer the convenience of dropping in a full height GPU but even so why go with a mid tower case then?

Use a smaller PSU and a smaller case and eliminate the DVD drive. Now you have a $249 system that isn't perceptibly worse than the $299 system.

Yea, on the same page why 500W, mid-tower... and the 1x4Gb stick, that means no dual channel. Not sure how it hurts performance, but I wouldn't consider getting another stick into it.

It would've been nice with a discreet appearance Mico-ATX tower with just a good ATX 350 PSU that was 80+ (Bronze) (saves on cost for a SFX PSU) then a easy $230 price.

This has me thinking they're hoping to fool people into think it's some great upgrade gaming box by just stuffing a R7 270 in it because it already has a 500W PSU.

www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1641686
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148767
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313423
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136270

$191.97 :cool:

I've pumped out 5 or 6 of these for old people in the last month or so since AM1 game out. But once you include the $99 for Windows, Cyberpower's price actually isn't that far off, surprisingly.

TRWOVFor an embedded system?

This isn't technically an embedded system.

Casecutterand the 1 4Gb stick, that means no dual channel not sure how it hurts performance but wouldn't consider getting another stick into it

AM1 is single-channel only, so it doesn't matter.

newtekie1This isn't technically an embedded system.

yeah, you're right. I read "Motherboard - Built in AMD Sempron & Athlon-Series Socket AM1" and got confused.

Because all men for fathers day want a cheap underpowered lackluster PC that they'll chuck about as fast as they realize how crappy it is. That is if it lasts that long. For that price I'd guess all the parts are ones that have a lifespan of about 1 week.

NC37Because all men for fathers day want a cheap underpowered lackluster PC that they'll chuck about as fast as they realize how crappy it is. That is if it lasts that long. For that price I'd guess all the parts are ones that have a lifespan of about 1 week.

Honestly, my Father In Law loved the Sempron 3850 machine I built for him. It allows him to do everything he needs to do on a PC. The AM1 platform might be inexpensive, but they definitely get the job done if you aren't looking to play games or do any type of rendering.

As for the quality of the components, they are using a Gigabyte board that normally comes with a 3 year warranty if you buy it by itself. Yeah it isn't a high end motherboard, but it should last no problem. The power supply is a bit questionable, but I've certainly seen far worse powering systems that consume a lot more power. And that is the thing with AM1 computers, they consume so little power, even the most generic power supply can handle the load. When you have an entire system that will never go above 100w under full load, a generic 500w power supply is going to handle it just fine. The same goes with the motherboards. You don't need all solid caps on a motherboard that is powering a 25w processor.

This is a good everyday machine, where people aren't transcoding video, working with music, playing modern video games, or bit mining. For facebook, email, netflix, youtube, looking at cell phone pics and online banking? It still has too much power.

[QUOTE="newtekie1, post: 3122946, member:


AM1 is single-channel only, so it doesn't matter.[/QUOTE]

So, if you were to put another stick of memory in the system, would each one be running on a 32 bit bus? or does each one run at half speed? I know you can use two, but im not sure what happens technically.

NC37Because all men for fathers day want a cheap underpowered lackluster PC that they'll chuck about as fast as they realize how crappy it is. That is if it lasts that long. For that price I'd guess all the parts are ones that have a lifespan of about 1 week.

I built a Sempron 3850, 15 days ago to be my HTPC. It does everything great. The feeling when on the desktop is as good as on my quad core AM3. Browsing is great, flash games are smooth, 1080p movies are no problem. But it does have it's limitations. Where ultra hi definition videos don't have hardware decoding support, it just can't do it because of the limited cpu processing power. It can't play 1080p H265, for example. But this is something you are expecting. It is also dead silent, and I mean dead silent. I mean dead silent with 30 degrees Celsius in a hot summer day this period in Athens. It's just perfect for the typical every day tasks with minimal power consumption and almost zero noise.

TheinsanegamerNSo, if you were to put another stick of memory in the system, would each one be running on a 32 bit bus? or does each one run at half speed? I know you can use two, but im not sure what happens technically.

It's better to think of this in terms of memory ranks. Each side of the DIMM with memory chips is a rank, so a dual-sided DIMM has two ranks and two dual-sided DIMMs have four ranks - you don't need two DIMMs to have multiple ranks. (There are exceptions to this and some single sided DIMMs have two ranks.) Each rank in a DIMMs is 64-bits wide. All ranks share the same data bus, so when you have multiple ranks, the memory controller can only address one rank at a time in order to prevent collisions on the data bus. Ranks aren't interleaved like if they ran as two separate 32-bit buses or four 16-bit buses.

There are some clever techniques that the memory controller uses to optimize with multiple ranks (e.g. reading from one rank while the other is charging) but the tradeoff is that by adding more ranks, the electrical load is increased and you can't run the memory bus at as high a frequency. Therefore, with all things equal (timings, frequency, capacity, price) it makes sense to buy the DIMM or DIMMs with the fewest number of ranks.

In contrast, memory chips within each rank are interleaved. Since the rank always has a 64-bit bus, then if you double the chips per rank then each chip must have half the bus width. So a DIMM with 8 chips per rank/side will use 8-bit memory chips while a DIMM with 16 chips per rank/side will use 4-bit memory chips. This is similar in graphics cards - they usually use 32-bit GDDR5 chips but a few cards with large memory capacity (e.g. GTX Titan) have double the memory chips and each chip runs at 16-bit.

Actually the dual rank stuff runs better on AMD chips.

www.techpowerup.com/197145/amd-a-series-kaveri-performs-better-with-dual-rank-dimms-report.html

SteevoActually the dual rank stuff runs better on AMD chips.

www.techpowerup.com/197145/amd-a-series-kaveri-performs-better-with-dual-rank-dimms-report.html

Given the same memory frequency and timings, that is completely reasonable that more ranks will result in higher performance due to memory controller optimizations. However, since the difference will only be a few percent, you are still better off with fewer ranks since you can clock the memory bus at a higher frequency and more than make up the difference. That article you reference shows a performance increase of ~5% by using dual-rank DIMMs but a performance increase of ~15% by using DDR3-2400 instead of DDR3-1866.

The Von MatricesGiven the same memory frequency and timings, that is completely reasonable that more ranks will result in higher performance due to memory controller optimizations. However, since the difference will only be a few percent, you are still better off with fewer ranks since you can clock the memory bus at a higher frequency and more than make up the difference. That article you reference shows a performance increase of ~5% by using dual-rank DIMMs but a performance increase of ~15% by using DDR3-2400 instead of DDR3-1866.

Interesting points. Thanks for this.

Fractal Core 1000/1500 or similar simple and good-looking would be a wiser case choice to a PC like this, instead of that toy-looking space-case.