AMD Trek IV - The Beat Goes On

[raymac46]

My experience with a series of AMD powered systems is sort of like the Star Trek movie series - I'll explain below:

 

AMD Trek I - The Archaic Colossus

This system belonged to my late parents and I think they got it around 2004. It ran Windows XP and never got upgraded past SP1. All they did was use a dial-up connection and send a few emails with it. My mother saved all her files on floppy disks and never put anything on the 40GB hard drive but the operating system.

It featured an Athlon XP 2500+, 256 MB of RAM, and a VIA chipset with onboard video. The system was installed was a huge solid old case and had a 17 inch CRT monitor.

I brought the system home because nobody else wanted it. Over a few years I upgraded the memory and video and switched to Linux. However lately the old processor became obsolete, and Flash wasn't supported under Linux any longer. I thought of rebuilding the system inside the case and ordered some parts. However the case itself turned out to be very DIY unfriendly. At the end of the day I took the old beast and its CRT monitor to the recycling depot. I'll have to remember my parents when I look at their their antique furniture and china I suppose, not an old PC.

 

AMD Trek II - The Linux Legend

This desktop I got in early 2008. It is a whitebox build specifically made for Linux, and never has had anything else installed. It still runs fine. It has one of AMD's finest processors - Athlon 64 X2 4600+. Originally it had onboard AMD video, but when the X1250 chipset was no longer supported I switched to Nvidia. I have upgraded memory as well. This is still a great machine and will soon be moving over to my workroom to play music.

 

AMD Trek III - The Tethered Notebook

This is a Windows 7 machine that gets a lot of kitchen and dining room use. I was so pleased with the Athlon 64 desktop unit, that I deliberately got a Dell Inspiron M501R 15.6 inch notebook with a Phenom II quad core P920. This notebook also has a discrete AMD 550V video card and does a nice job with video, web surfing, and office tasks. It can't really compete with Intel's mobile hardware though, and it has rather short battery life so you need the power cord handy at all times. This one is a bit disappointing, although it has been a solid machine for me and still runs well. AMD has since improved its laptop performance a lot with the APUs.

 

AMD Trek IV - The Beat Goes On

This is my first personal build using the parts I ordered to fix up my parents defunct system - only with a new case and power supply. It was an easy job since it has an AMD Trinity quad core A8-5600K APU (no video card needed.) It has a Gigabyte FM2 socket Motherboard, 8 GB of DDR3 1600 RAM, a Samsung DVD-RW and a Toshiba 1 TB hard drive. I thought about getting a solid state drive to boot from, but I wanted to keep my costs down so the 1 TB drive will do the job for boot and storage. This is another Linux Machine - Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon 64 bit.

It worked right out of the chute (whew!) and I'm posting from it now. Linux Mint recommends using the open source Radeon driver for the graphics and it works very well for basic 3D and gives me some nice eye candy. AMD is supposed to lag behind Intel these days but I like this system a lot - It seems fast and powerful.

AMD has now come out with the Richland APUs which are faster and have better graphics specs but I like to stay trailing edge a bit so that the Linux support will be there for video.

 

My experience with AMD over the years has generally been very positive, so I don't worry if their single core performance and die shrink tech lags Intel a bit. I think they make a great processor for the money.

[Guest LilBambi]

Very nice!

[raymac46]

After a couple more weeks with this AMD A8 system, I can wholeheartedly recommend it if you are going to build a system to run Linux.

Here's what stands out in my view:

(1) Simplicity - drop in the CPU, clamp on the heatsink. No special cooler or thermal paste needed for the first installation. Everything is set to go out of the box. You won't need to install a video card either.

(2) Value. For less than $100 you have a 4 core processor and a pretty good graphics card. For general use this system seems as snappy as an i5 with a GTX650 Ti Boost graphics card running Windows 7 - that particular CPU-GPU combination runs around $400. You'd obviously see a difference in gaming, but not in Web surfing, office tasks, watching videos, listening to music.

(3) Power consumption - the whole system takes around 100W total load in general use. That means you can go with a lower capacity power supply and you don't need special cables for PCI-express cards.

(4) Freedom - the FOSS Radeon driver works just great with this chip. You don't need to install a proprietary blob for best results. The driver supplies Direct Rendering and hardware based 3D acceleration. With FOSS you know you'll have support for a long time. No more worrying about whether your legacy graphics card is supported by AMD,

 

So if you've been holding off on AMD because of poor graphics support, you can and should take another look at these nice APUs.

Edited October 21, 2013 by raymac46