It's absolutely not laughable, not at all. You would be surprised just how slow things can get at same places on the Internet. Flash games or High res videos might get a separate process now, but many things still don't (for security and other reasons) ...well, maybe they do on Chrome now with it's nice "threaded compositing", but there is absolutely no guarantee that Average Joe will use Chrome, nor I would recommend to do until it's going to be safe "again" btw, (even if I really like and respect what Google is doing for the world on other areas). Massive java scripts (which are still hard to get multi-threaded properly or heavy tabs like Reddit+RES suite with full of opened posts for several pages, and many security related things are still mostly about ipc, and believe me, they do can feel snappier on a faster processor sometimes, you should really try it yourself if you doubt it.
For example, I love to play QuakeLive with my buddies, and it loves the Pentium over the APU (and no, graphics is not really an issue with the idtech3 engine on current GPUs, it's the cpu which struggles). Again, this is more about games and not the browsing part.. almost all of the games which are "playable" on low end GPUs (read: more than 15 fps) will feel much better with a dedicated graphics card, and "much better" still might be an understatement here, because most of the games will run way much better tbh, like +10fps or more which is huge in terms of smooth gameplay experience.
Yes there are many things what Average Joe might do and what would feel better on the APU (
and I honestly hope that these things will keep coming faster and faster in the future, because I do like APUs). For example, CIV5 would be playable around 20-25 fps and it would love the more cores, or L4D2 if you are the host and using many mods (but Source is already very fast on two cores too tbh), or handling compressed archives are also faster, or encoding videos with CPU only (not Xvid tho, which is single threaded iirc), etc.. so more and more things will get multithreaded which will - sooner or later - reach Average Joe too.. All I'm saying that perhaps it's too early to bow down front of the APUs, perhaps the next ones will worth it
Hmm, a Pentium will eat 35W-ish if the IGP is not used .. So you have about 75W to spend on the rest. Now, a "monster" card (in low end terms ofc) like the GTX650 eats 65W-ish with furmark (
and much less with normal loads) ... and that will leave the APU standing still in just about every game.... so you do the math.
yes sir
. The funny thing is that you can even fit a low power i5 there (if you are lucky), but I did not mention this because of the budget comparision