Testing Different Memory Speeds on AMD’s A8-3850 Llano APU

Memory Performance on AMD’s A-Series APU

Last month Legit Reviews reviewed the AMD A8-3850 ‘Llano’ APU and our article looks like it was well received by our readers with the exception of one thing. We’ve had a number of readers write in saying that it was great that we tested this platform with 1866MHz memory, but they are building budget systems and want to use 1333MHz or 1600MHz memory. It is true that we didn’t look at performance numbers of AMD’s A-Series APUs on the A75 chipset at 1333MHz, 1600MHz and since this platform is very budget friendly we see this as a valid point.

Legit Reviews does not want to ostracize any of our readers and pride ourselves on our no-BS straight forward and honest reviews, so we went back to the drawing board to get you the performance data you need before ordering in a new platform. We’ll be using the Gigabyte GA-A75-UD4H motherboard for testing again, but since we updated the BIOS to version F3 we re-did all of the performance numbers as we did see improved performance with the new BIOS.

We also got a few questions about how the platform handles 16GB of memory and if there are any stability issues with running all four memory slots fully populated. We’ve seen performance gains with all the memory slots full on AMD platforms in the past, so we’ll be looking at 2x4GB and 4x4GB performance as well in our test results. Not too many people will be running 16GB of memory on the Llano A-Series APU, but we found no issues in doing so with G.Skill Ripjaws

So, to reiterate what our goals are for this article one more time:

• Benchmark 2x4GB memory kits at 1333MHz, 1600MHz, 1866MHz to find performance differences
• Benchmark 2x4GB versus 4x4GB to see if filling all the memory slots impacts performance
• See if we have any issues running 16GB of memory

This should be easy enough, so let’s take a look at the test system and get right to the performance numbers.