No, not political correctness — personal computer. I’m doing a mobo/processor upgrade. I notice that almost all the AMD processors have Radeon graphics built in. I assume that in order to take advantage of this, I have to have a mobo with video support? I’ve been operating off an old PCI express card for years, and have no problems with it, but if I can get significant performance improvement from the new built-in GPU, it might be worth spending a little more for a video mobo. I don’t do any heavy graphics, but maybe it would be nice to go to full HD and fast processing.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, all the boards have video outputs, so when it says it has no on-board video support, that just means that it has no dedicated graphics chips, and relies on the processor, right? So the GPU built in to the CPU would work, and be better than my old PCI express? Or is the separate card better because it has its own memory?
Interesting, I haven’t look at AMD processor for a while and didn’t realize they’ve been putting the GPU with the CPU in the same package for their desktop processor. Usually that APU package is something I’ve seen on laptops to save space. But yea, it appears the motherboard is just a bridge to the APU and the display ports. You can purchase another discrete Radeon graphics card for dual GPU performance but that is usually something you see high-end gamers go for. But on it’s own any of the 7000 or 8000 series Radeon GPU’s will be a huge leap in performance over an old PCI graphics card. PCI bandwidth was pretty anemic for graphics performance even when it was a new technology. Which is why dedicated graphics card ports were quickly introduced. Since you’re not running games you won’t miss out on not having dedicated memory from a graphics card. 4 gigs of ram would be adequate but it’s worth going for at least 8 gigs to take advantage of a 64bit operating system.
I’ve ran nothing but Radeon graphics for years because of they offer a lot of bang for the buck. I’m running the Radeon 7750 right now because it sips power which means I didn’t need to purchase an expensive power supply upgrade. Yet it still achieves adequate performance to play most current video games with medium to high settings. For things other than games you’ll get faster rendering of Flash or Java content on websites. Also the Radeon graphic processor will handle the decoding of video content leaving the CPU free to handle other tasks. The Radeon graphics will also handle the encoding of video if you do that sort of thing at all.
All x86 computers need/have a graphic card/chip, just Intel and Amd have went from integrating them on the motherboard to on the cpu chip, For the most part Rand any modern integrated Graphics Card (verse Discrete Graphics Card “separate”) will do anything you need short of Video gaming or Video editing, they got them to the point of HD video (720/1080) playback should be fine, I have my doubhts about 4k but have at least 2 years till it become prevalent if that.. All the major box vendors don’t put discrete graphics cards in there machines till 500$ plus. In your case the main reason to get a non integrated video card is the video processing takes up the thermal head room of the processor and the graphics chip won’t be using the ram. In AMD case the APU with integrated Graphics are slower/ fewer core cpus, topping out at 4 cores, while their non integrated FX series can have 4 to 8 Cores. (Cores being separate Cpus that can handle different tasks at same time helping multi tasking or scientific computing, would recommend at minimum 2 Cores and now adays nearly impossible to get one without). In the current state of things Intel runs circles around Amd as Far as CPU speeds/efficiency the GHz is very misleading now adays and power efficiency. While the AMD integrated graphics is better than Intels and AMD tends to pack more cores at lower price points. My guess is i3-3xxx or i3-4xxxx from intel with no graphics card, or AMD A8-xxxx or FX-6xxx or better (the fx you will need a discrete graphics cards don’t need spend more than 60$) will be more than enough for your needs.
OH forgot the Amd APU use a different mother board vs the FX, where APU has a integrated graphics chip inside the CPU chip and have boards that support discrete graphics Cards, the FX Boards have to have Discrete Graphics Cards and possibly support a Motherboard integrated graphics solution , but not quite sure on that since the FXs are still using sockets from when the graphics Card was integrated to the motherboard.
I’m not sure if this still applies (it was two years ago) but when I built my current system, I had to go with a video card instead of using the on-board video. The reason was the number of ports; the motherboard only had one. I wanted to run three monitors, so went with a vid card. So, my suggestion; if going multiscreen is a possibility for you, make sure whatever you do has the capability.
Pretty much all of AMD’s A-series and all of Intel’s newer consumer-grade processors have an integrated GPU on the die. As such, any motherboard that supports the processor *should* have video-out ports on it.
Now, that being said, in many cases the Intel graphics perform as well, if not better, than the AMD graphics. It just depends on the chip… the GPU on an AMD A4 or A6 chip will smoke any Intel CPU that uses the HD Graphics 2500 or 3000 GPU, but any Intel chip that uses HD 4000 or a better GPU will probably beat them. An AMD A8 or A10 chip will smoke all of Intel’s GPUs…
That being said, Intel’s CPUs are superior in pretty much every possible way to AMD CPUs, whether it’s power consumption, performance per watt, overall performance, etc.
Another thing you need to take into account is memory and what kind of hard drive you’re going to use. Those play a huge role nowadays in overall performance. You should aim to have, at a minimum, RAM that is at least DDR3-1600 and a Solid State hard drive (at a minimum, at least have a small SSD to run the operating system off of).
If I were building a very basic work machine today, I would go with an Core i5-4440 (or, if I really needed to skimp, a Core i3-4330, but I’d be giving up two cores in the process, which are really needed for video editing). If I were forced to use an AMD chip, I wouldn’t use anything that wasn’t in the A10 series, with the A10-6800K being the lowest end chip that I would use (it has a more powerful GPU than any of the Intel chips, but its CPU is only equivalent to maybe an Intel i3 series chip). I will emphasize again that you need to make sure you use DDR3-1600 memory or faster, and an SSD (for at least the OS) in order to get the best performance.
I’m not really upgrading for speed. My mobo is starting to flake out, sometimes seeing SATA errors on boot. I think for now I’m just going to upgrade to one with four RAM slots for potential 32 GB (current only has two), that can handle existing processor (an A4 5400) and DDR3 1333 ram (8 GB). After I get it and look at the manual, I’ll make a decision about upgrading CPU and RAM, and keep my current PCI Express video card (8 GB) for now. Also, I ordered an Intel 128 GB SSD, that I’ll migrate Linux to.
Once you go SSD you’ll never want to go back. You’ll see just how much the hard drive is a bottleneck on overall system performance. Every customer I upgrade to SSD I give them their computer back and they log in for the first time and kick back in their chair, accustomed to the several minutes it normally takes to load the user profile. Then, they blink at the screen a few times and exclaim, “Holy crap! It’s done already!?!”. When, I got a SSD for my desktop I decided to put a clean install of Win7 on it. 5 minutes after dropping the install disk into the DVD drive I was booting to a Windows 7 desktop. And about 3 minutes of that was just copying the install files from the disc into memory.
I’ve rebuilt two computers in the last year with AMD A8 and A10 processors. I bought new FX motherboards for both and am using the on board video. They both seem to be working quite well. I have also replaced the hard drives of two computers (not the same) with SSD drives. Aside from the hassle of reinstalling Windows all computers are running quite well and very fast. I love the price of AMD.
There are separate motherboards for AMD APUs and CPUs. e.g. FX series only motherboards have no video connectors on them. So you have to make sure the AMD motherboard you buy supports their APUs. ASUS and Gigabyte are good motherboard brands.
As for an SSD if I had to buy one now I would probably go with the 3D vertically stacked NAND ones that Samsung launched recently.
http://techreport.com/review/27464/samsung-850-evo-solid-state-drive-reviewed
An APU will always have worse performance than a GPU with dedicated video ram on it. CPU DRAM has worse performance characteristics than video DRAM for several reasons. But the performance should be good enough for desktop use and better than the old Intel integrated graphics trash. Among other things in the AMD APU design the built-in GPU core can access the on-chip L3 cache which is shared the CPU core so the graphics performance is pretty decent. The Sony Playstation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One both use AMD APUs and the graphics performance is good enough.