AMD AM1 Kabini Part 2: Athlon 5350/5150 and Sempron 3850/2650 Tested
by Ian Cutress on May 29, 2014 2:00 PM ESTCPU Synthetic Benchmarks
Content Creation - Cinebench
Based on MAXON’s CINEMA 4D animation software, Cinebench is used to determine the CPU and graphics performance via OpenGL. The software has gone through many iterations over the years, and here we use versions 10, 11.5 and 15 to compare single-threaded and multi-threaded CPU performance. As the generations increase, the software becomes more multithread aware and scales better, however for consistency with older results we keep the version 10 results in our database.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Console Emulation –Dolphin Benchmark: link
At the start of 2014 I was emailed with a link to a new emulation benchmark based on the Dolphin Emulator. The issue with emulators tends to be two-fold: game licensing and raw CPU power required for the emulation. As a result, many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant post to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53; meaning that anything scoring better than this is faster than an actual Wii for processing Wii code, albeit emulated.
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tarqsharq - Friday, May 30, 2014 - link
Or League of Legends.... I have a friend whose little brother would benefit from a machine that could run League without barfing.Low budget, bench some free to play games!
HighTech4US - Friday, May 30, 2014 - link
I have no need for any these underpowered CPUs from either Intel or AMD. As shown in the X264 tests the Intel Q8400 blows away all these low end parts. My main need is video encoding. Yes I know the Q8400 it is a 95 watt part but I recently spent $34 total to upgrade my 2008 system that has an Asus P5K Deluxe motherboard from a Q6600 105 watt CPU to a 50 watt Xeon L5420 50 watt CPU.$29 for the Intel L5420
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&...
Intel specs on the L5420
http://ark.intel.com/products/33929/Intel-Xeon-Pro...
$5 for the Socket LGA 771-775 adaptor
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&...
Intel specs on the Q6600
http://ark.intel.com/products/29765/Intel-Core2-Qu...
For $34 I have an upgraded system (100 mhz higher speed (2.5 vs 2.4 Ghz), 4MB (12 vs 8) more Cache, a higher FSB (1333 vs 1066) and much lower TPD (50 watts vs 105 watts) and this system put the hurt to all these low end parts.
I also sold off the Q6600 on eBay for $40 so my upgrade was basically FREE.
ozzuneoj86 - Saturday, May 31, 2014 - link
I've done this myself! While I wouldn't necessarily recommend that most people run out and buy an obsolete motherboard, mod it, buy expensive DDR2 and then buy a dirt cheap Xeon and mod that... BUT, I've modified a couple of systems like this and the performance per dollar is fantastic. I also like to use the L5240 3Ghz dual core 40W Xeons. Strictly from a performance per dollar perspective they will stomp all over any of these modern value CPUs, and you can pick up a pair of them for $15 or less. I own six or eight of them... I lost count... I also had a pair of L5420s, but used one to upgrade an old Dell which I sold for a $300 profit. I have two Dual Xeon boards I picked up on ebay a year and a half ago for $60 each, and have two L5240 3Ghz Duals in them. Performance in most cases should be similar to a desktop i3, but I only had to invest around $200 into the CPUs, coolers, motherboard and 8Gb of (unbuffered) ECC DDR2.These systems don't sip power by any means, so I wouldn't recommend them as file servers but they aren't bad for normal usage cases. One of my Dual Xeon systems is my living room gaming\htpc, coupled with a 350W Seasonic 80plus PSU I got on ebay for $15 and a Radeon HD 7750 I got on sale for $40... it's really quite a powerful system for how inexpensive it was.
casteve - Friday, May 30, 2014 - link
Thanks for the review, Ian.Perhaps this would have been better covered from a more likely scenario - web browser/office productivity, and HTPC. I can't imagine anyone using these for scientific/big gaming/video encoding set ups. Might be handy as a HTPC in the den - what's the HQV score, for example? How well does it perform with lower need Steam games. Heck, how well does it perform with Steam streaming?
toyotabedzrock - Friday, May 30, 2014 - link
No tests of the hardware encoding engines?haardrr - Saturday, May 31, 2014 - link
back-the-day i was rooting for AMD, and i was pissed at the fact the anandtech used intel processors that were 3-4 times more expensive than AMD...i kept hoping that AMD was equal or faster than Intel. Sadly NEVER!.
the closest that amd came was an oc'd FX8350 against a stock 4570k.
But AMD had to use double the power consumption!...
fast forward to right now, i bought the 5150 and a asrock am1h-itx. The asrock am1 motherboard is awesome (maybe a bit expensive, but it has dc-in, all all the standard outputs; no overclocking though)
Dissappointed by the 5150, and wondered if a 25% bump in clock speed that the 5350 has would fix the "slow" feel i get from the 5150, i bought the 5350 on sale at 65.
while AMD has priced the 5350, to "theoretically" match the performance of a g3420, (5350's can't match it in normal use)
a celeron g1610/ g1810 on 14.04 linux has better mythtv deinterlacing, than the 5350 does.
there was a time that you needed an Nvidia GPU (VDPAU) for proper deinterlacing, but with intels open source work, the NVIDIA card is now not necessary but an asset. Whereas with the 5350 requires an NVIDIA card (gt630v2 gk208)... maybe someday the AMD engineers will think that the Hardware features that they build into their processors, should be usable under linux...
i bought the 5350 thinking that it would work well with MythTV... thinking that it could handle openGL high quality, yadif 2x deinterlacing, or even greedymotion 2x... it can't!. the best you can hope for is Yadif. and to get that you need to install the oibaf PPA to get VDPAU!... mind you it does use alot less power than the openGL deinterlacing. the main problem is AMD just does not care about free opensource opengl drivers (the ps4 while "linux" is not open, thus not open source, so AMD cares about it) so Mythtv sucks on the amd 5350. the only advantage the the 5350/asrock am1h-itx has is that it idles at 16 watts(laptop 19v psu), and the msi h61i/g3420 idles at 19 watts.(tfx bronze 300w... surprisingly efficent at low level, equal or 2watts better than the gold seasonic tfx. at the 20 watt level)
THE PROBLEM IS THAT the intel g3420 on trusty tahr(14.04) can deinterlace OTA HDTV 1080i, at yadif 2x... for 30 dollars more. in order for the 5350 system to deinterlace properly, requires an nvidia gt640v2 at 70.
to sum up, I regret buying the 5150 (waste of silicon), the 5350 can be useful under some scenarios, and the asrock am1h-itx( while 75$, has dc-in) is absolutely required to make the 5350 useful.
AMD has got to stop Acting like a loser (cut back, way back because they are a console CPU maker, and perhaps a server cpu maker) and produce a cpu that is better than intels.
jospoortvliet - Sunday, June 1, 2014 - link
Well, good to know these AMD CPU's suck for a basic mythtv box... Too bad.Soul_Est - Sunday, July 27, 2014 - link
I was looking to do the same thing under Linux using the 5350. Arch Linux + ( MythTV || TVHeadEnd ) + XBMC. Well, I'll start my HTPC planning from square one again.The PS4 runs FreeBSD and not Linux IIRC.
Soul_Est - Sunday, July 27, 2014 - link
Wish I could edit my own replies.Just did the pricing on the AMD (Athlon 5350, ASUS AM1I-A) and the Intel (Celeron G1820, BIOSTAR Hi-Fi B85N) components and they are similar in price. Too similar given what may be a large performance delta. Would the G1820 handle yadif 2x much better you think?
Soul_Est - Sunday, July 27, 2014 - link
Given that I don't know what your complete setup is haardrr, what do you make of this? http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Vdpau#AMD