The Desktop Kabini Review Part 1: AMD Athlon 5350 (AM1) Tested

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• 5thaccount - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link

  100% agree. Any Core 2 or newer based system with plenty of memory and an SSD will work fine for most users out there (the ones that use office, browse the web, and watch youtube)... and for quite a few years to come. Heck, I'm still using my E5200 daily after 6 years. Works perfect! Even looking at these benchmarks, the new Kabini is slower than a Core 2 Duo E8400. Which, oddly enough, can be picked up for under $20 on eBay... now that's a deal!

• jonathanharrison - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link

  I got a whole Vostro 200 system used with 20" widescreen LCD, 4GB DDR2 RAM (667), Core 2 Duo E6550 from a dude on Craigslist for a mere $45. Wife had gone to the Mac side and wanted the system out of the house ASAP. That's one way to do it - all but GIVE it away :)
  
  On-board intel graphics kinda don't cut it for gaming, so... when I could, I added a Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB video card ($109) and a 550W ThermalTake power supply ($40) into it and plugged it also into my other 20" monitor with a HDMI-DVI cable ($8) for a nice dual display... may go triple-head when I can afford to... wireless mouse/keyboard set ($30), Logitech gamepad F310, ($25)... and I've got a pretty nice light/older (DX9/10) gaming system for less than $220 of new purchases...

• trueserve - Friday, April 18, 2014 - link

  "A CPU only holds value if it is overclockable and the motherboard supports overclocking the processor."
  
  wat.

• mikato - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link

  Yeah, I had a Core 2 Duo E7300 in my wife's gaming system, and then when the latest COD came out with higher requirements, I bought a nice GTX 760 video card to put in there (with bigger PSU), and a better Core 2 Duo E8500 on ebay to go with it. Unfortunately the CPU was still really limiting things though, even after overclocking as much as I could, so in the end I had to build a new system around the video card... got an i5 4670K. But your point is valid. The system was used for HTPC tasks, XBMC, Skype, etc as well and the Core 2 Duos performed just great in everything besides the latest COD game, which is apparently a resource hog.

• phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link

  Wouldn't the PCIe x4 slot be the bigger bottleneck?

• nathanddrews - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link

  PCIe 3.0 x2 = PCIe 2.0 x4 = PCIe 1.0 x8 = 2GB/sec
  http://www.anandtech.com/show/5458/the-radeon-hd-7...
  
  Even with just a PCIe 2.0 x4 electrical, it would still be massively CPU-bound. I wonder if any other manufacturers will bother to do a fully enabled x16 slot?

• extide - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link

  They can't, there simply arent enough lanes on the CPU. If they ditched the NIC and uses every single lane for graphics, you could have x8.

• nathanddrews - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link

  Ah yes, you are correct.

• jonathanharrison - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link

  Hey, I resemble that. I've got a Radeon HD 7770 GHz being underfed by a Core 2 Duo E6550. Used system bought for cheap then added the video card, purchased new. I guess the 7750 would have been more than enough, but hey, the 7770 was a steal at $109. How's that for a CPU/GPU imbalance? Hey... at least it's in the right direction for gaming. I'd rather be CPU-limited than GPU-limited any day. I can still run 99% of the games out there, and do so with rather high settings and at least 4X AA most of the time. Maybe not 60fps in all games, but in a lot of them, especially the older ones, and getting 30fps or close in some of the newest (like MKKE).

• etamin - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link

  In the "key points" on the first page, you listed two SATA 3gbps ports, but the Gigabyte comes with 2x SATA III. The block diagram shows two "SATA 2/3". In any case, two SATA ports is extremely restrictive. If mSATA and/or secondary SATA controllers can be had for the same $35, this would make for a terrific micro media server.