Building an AMD A8-3870K Llano APU System For Under $300

Memory and Hard Drive Performance

Intel Celeron System From 2004:

AMD Llano System From 2012:

Benchmark Results: AIDA64 showed the AMD A8-3870K processor with the dual-channel DDR3 1333MHz memory with CL9 timings had roughly 7.3GB/s read and 5.5GB/s read speeds. The Intel Celeron 2GHz processor with single channel DDR 266Mhz memory had just 1.5GB/s of read and write memory bandwidth. Notice that the DDR 266MHz memory was running with 2-2-2 timings! Remember when high-end memory back then used to run at 400MHz at 2-2-2 timings? As you can see we have a 5x improvement in read memory bandwidth in the new system. and the latency is reduced by more than half.

Intel Celeron System From 2004:

AMD Llano System From 2012:

Benchmark Results: CrystalDiskMark showed the old 80GB IDE hard drive ran at 53MB/s on the sequential read and write tests. The new OCZ Vertex Plus R2 was much faster with a sequential read speed of 166.7MB/s and a write speed of 82.22MB/s. The other significant difference is in the random 4K read and write numbers. We went from ~0.5MB/s to ~14MB/s, which is a 28x performance improvement!

Intel Celeron System From 2004:

AMD Llano System From 2012:

Benchmark Results: ATTO 2.47 showed the old 80GB IDE hard drive ran at 54MB/s on the sequential read and write tests. The new OCZ Vertex Plus R2 60GB SSD was hitting 170MB/s and a write speed of 84MB/s. OCZ rates the Vertex Plus R2 60GB SSD as having a peak sequential read speed of 180MB/s and a write speed of 80MB/, so we are close to these numbers.