AMD Value Platform Analysis Part 1: Choosing the components

Conclusion

I would like to end this article with a glimpse of what’s in store in future parts of this series.

I will be testing the Athlon II at stock with a HD 4650 in 6 games and with 11 synthetic benchmarks. Then, we will overclock the Athlon II and HD 4650 and retest all those benchmarks. Then the GPU gets upgraded to HD 4770 and all the games and synthetic tests are rerun. The GPU gets upgraded again to HD 4870 512 MB and finally to HD 4890 1 GB. The 4870 and 4890 will also be tested at 1920×1200 resolution. This will provide an accurate representation of the numbers you can expect from this platform with a low-end GPU and a high end one. Later in this series I will be upgrading the CPU to Phenom II X2 550, then to Phenom II X3 720 and hopefully rounding the series off with Phenom II X4 Quad Core to see how the numbers change with the change in hardware.

Now when I say that this board is no pushover when it comes to overclocking, believe me. I would like to leave you with two screens as a testament to what this board and platform can do and something you can look forward to for our next part.

Join me next time.