raymac46 Posted March 11, 2014 Share Posted March 11, 2014 (edited) I'm really enjoying my home built desktop system that features an AMD A8 APU, but I wonder how really representative I am as a customer for that particular chip. It seems to me I'm a bit of a niche market to say the least. It's a desktop system - that in itself is a much smaller market than it used to be. This is a second system in the house, and how many folks have more than one desktop system on the go these days? It's strictly Linux which is another minority situation. I'm not using the machine for gaming, which seems to be a primary use of desktops today. It's not an HTPC in a small form factor case. So I can't be the focus of AMD's attention in building this APU. That said, the A8 does provide me with some useful features. Price is pretty good for a quad core processor and it has decent speed. A good basic GPU is included so I don't have to buy a discrete video card. Build was simple and straightforward. I didn't have any PCI-e cards at all until I decided to put in a wifi card. Power requirements were pretty low and a 430W power supply is more than adequate. Case airflow is excellent and everything is cool with the stock heatsink. I used the extra cash freed up from the video card to put in an SSD. I'm sure the real market for these units is in HTPCs and lower cost business builds where the performance for price and decent graphics are major advantages. However the niche market examples such as myself can benefit as well. Edited March 11, 2014 by raymac46 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted March 11, 2014 Share Posted March 11, 2014 Sounds like you have built yourself the perfect pc for you. Which is the point of self builds after all. As to the market AMD are aiming for I dun no. I think you will find that home pc gamers do not make up the majority of users just that they get the most media attention. I know quite a few home pc users and only a couple of them do any gaming. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted March 11, 2014 Author Share Posted March 11, 2014 These APUs do have some game as AMD has made specially modified units to power XBox and PS4 gaming consoles. Also my Windows PC (i5 Sandy Bridge and Nvidia GTX650 Ti Boost) is a pretty good gaming rig in its own right - even if most of the time it's surfing Facebook and displaying Costco flyers for my wife. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted March 12, 2014 Share Posted March 12, 2014 (edited) "i5 Sandy Bridge and Nvidia GTX650 Ti Boost" miles better than my gaming rig. Apart from the shoot em up games. There are some really interesting time wasters out there especially some of the indie games. In fact for just a few bucks you can have hours and hours of entertainment some of it is even educational. Edited March 12, 2014 by abarbarian Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted March 12, 2014 Author Share Posted March 12, 2014 As mentioned before I use the gaming PC to run "Train Simulator 2014." You need a fair bit of graphics muscle to simulate rain, realistic scenery and especially smoke and steam - plus have decent frame rates for smooth playability. TS2014 is only a DX9 game but it can eat graphics cards. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted March 12, 2014 Share Posted March 12, 2014 Yeah I had a looksee at the game after you posted about it some time back. Looks pretty realistic and the graphics are very very good so you do need a high spec rig to get the best out of it. As to the game, me I would rather watch paint dry. Give me a nasty in me crosshairs anyday Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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