AMD A6-3650 2.6GHz Llano APU Review

AMD A6-3650 APU Processor Review

Last month we brought you our in-depth review on the AMD A8-3850 ‘Llano’ Accelerated Processing Unit
(APU), which is the flagship processor in AMD’s new A-Series lineup. We found the processor to be ‘good enough’ for general computing tasks and it far exceeded our expectations as far as how the graphics processor performed. The AMD A8-3850 currently retails for $139.99 shipped and while that may seem like a fair price, we all know people out there are always looking for lower cost solutions. When AMD launched the AMD A-Series they announced two processors the A8-3850 and the A6-3650. Today we will be looking at the more budget friendly AMD A6-3650 APU that costs $20 less at $119.99 shipped.

The AMD A6-3650 APU is available as a retail boxed processor under the part number AD3650WNGXBOX and it retails for $119.99 shipped. Included for this price is of course the AMD A6-3650 APU, a cpu cooler and it is backed by a three year warranty. This is a socket FM1 processor, so you’ll need to have a motherboard with the 905-pin FM1 socket!

Here is a shot of the actual A6-3650 APU that we have for testing. This processor is marked AD3650WNZ43GX and was made on week 23 of 2011.

AMD has announced the A8-3850 and the A6-3650 APU’s and both are available to purchase now. AMD is planning on releasing two slower APU’s that feature 65W TDP’s called the A8-3800 and A6-3600 at a later date. The A8-3850 has a 2.9GHz quad-core CPU, 600MHz GPU w/ 400 Radeon
cores, 4MB of L2 cache and a 100W TDP. The APU that we are looking at today is the A6-3650 and it has a 2.6GHz
quad-core CPU, 443MHz GPU w/ 320 Radeon cores, 4MB of L2 cache and a
100W TDP. With the 300MHz lower CPU clock speed and 157MHz lower GPU clock speeds on fewer Radeon cores we already know the A6-3650 is going to be significantly slower when it comes to performance.

Before we move on to benchmarking and overclocking we wanted to give you the details on the graphics performance on the two AMD A-Series APU’s as the difference between the GPUs in the A6 and the A8 is rather significant. The AMD A8-3850 APU has the AMD Radeon HD 6550D GPU inside and it has 400 Radeon cores
and a clock speed of 600MHz. The Radeon HD 6550D is capable of reaching
480 GFLOPS of GPU peak compute, which is rather impressive. The GPU inside the AMD A6-3650 is called the Radeon HD 6530D GPU and it has 320 Radeon cores running at 443MHz with performance reaching 284 GFLOPS of GPU compute power. When it comes to peak GPU compute power the AMD A8-3850 has 69% GFLOPS than the A6-3650 for an additional $20 more at the time of purchase. If you care about GPU performance you might want to pay that extra 17% and get better performance. Let’s look at the test system and then the benchmarks to see if it is worth it.