AMD Carrizo Part 2: A Generational Deep Dive into the Athlon X4 845 at $70
by Ian Cutress on July 14, 2016 9:00 AM ESTAlien: Isolation at 3 GHz
If first person survival mixed with horror is your sort of thing, then Alien: Isolation, based off of the Alien franchise, should be an interesting title. Developed by The Creative Assembly and released in October 2014, Alien: Isolation has won numerous awards from Game Of The Year to several top 10s/25s and Best Horror titles, ratcheting up over a million sales by February 2015. Alien: Isolation uses a custom built engine which includes dynamic sound effects and should be fully multi-core enabled. We take the average frame rate as our marker with a scripted version of the built-in benchmark.
For this test we used the following settings with our graphics cards:
| Alien Isolation Settings | |||
| Resolution | Quality | ||
| Low GPU | Integrated Graphics | 1280x720 | Ultra |
| ASUS R7 240 1GB DDR3 | |||
| Medium GPU | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB | 1920x1080 | Ultra |
| MSI R9 285 Gaming 2G | |||
| High GPU | ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB | 1920x1080 | Ultra |
| MSI R9 290X Gaming 4G | |||
Unfortunately, Alien Isolation pushed a significant update for low-end AMD cards (like the R7 240) near the end of our benchmark suite, meaning that the 18 months of data with the card are now in the trash. Nevertheless, the rest of the results from our other cards show that Carrizo is comprehensively out performed by Kaveri in every test. It's worth remembering that the Carrizo part only has PCIe 3.0 x8 available, but the difference is mostly likely to do with data transfer through the L2 caches.
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coder111 - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Wow, another Asus A6 user. I still use my K73TA daily. Quite happy with it. Never tried overclocking, but now that you mention it I will.How does the cooling hold up? I have had my laptop shutdown several times due to temperature getting too high after heavy APU+dGPU use.
I just wish there was a way to replace 6550M with something faster...
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Repaste the parts. The paste on that thing is half a decade old.Also, undervolt the chips. You can cut a ton of voltage off of the CPU with k10stat.
If you really want to go DIY, there are those like me that cut a hole in the bottom of the laptop and put a grill over the fan, that lowered temps by about 20C for me.
coder111 - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Hi,Thanks for ideas! I'm on Linux, so I'll see if there are k10stat alternatives on Linux. I'll definitely repaste the parts. And I'll see if I can do the grill on the bottom as well...
--Coder
coder111 - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Could you post the pics of your grill on the bottom somewhere?Thanks
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
That laptop is long gone, im afraid. The chassis did not hold up very well to my constant moving.There was a forum on notebookreview about doing said mod, but the pictures are no longer available. the waybackmachine might be able to provide pics.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/k53ta-bbr6...
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
I had the exact same laptop! I went with an a4 to force the dGPU, since AMD kept screwing up the ability to choose which GPU you wanted to use. 3.2 GHz dual core was amazing.Sushisamurai - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I like this pseudo-new review format. Very clean, and the shout out to manufacture/companies was a nice touch. I think u should include if the SSD's are MLC or TLC In that brief summary for those who forget.keg504 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
What does OCCT mean? It doesn't seem to be explained in the articleArnulf - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
http://www.ocbase.com/ ?keg504 - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Ah, thanks. A cursory search of google gave me many different results for OCCT