The Best Sub-£100 CPU

AMD A8-3850

Manufacturer: AMD
UK price (as reviewed): £99.99 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed): $134.99 (ex tax)

We saw the AMD A8-3850 for the first time recently and were impressed by it; it’s the first time we’ve ever been able to game comfortably at 1,920 x 1,080 with all the settings on high (apart from AA) when using an integrated GPU. We’re testing the A8-3850 again, however – this time with a different suite of games – to find out if it still retains its charms.

Physically, there’s little to differentiate the A8-3850 from the cheaper A6-3650; both are FM1 APUs based around a quad-core CPU design. The four cores of the APU are based on the Husky design, which is little more than a slight tweak and process shrink of the K10 Stars microarchitecture – the basis of AMD’s Phenom II processors. Most notably, AMD has removed the L3 cache from the design (presumably to accommodate the GPU), so while each core has a 128KB pool of L1 and a 1MB pool of L2 cache, there’s no larger pool of shared cache.

The A8-3850 performed well in Cinebench 11.5 and WPrime; only the 3.2GHz Phenom II X4 955 BE could beat it in these tests. The A8-3850’s performance wasn’t as impressive in our Media Benchmarks, though, which look at both memory performance and instructions per clock. The A8-3850 scored an overall 1,113, which is a mid-table result and slower than cheaper processors such as the dual-core Pentiums.

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The A8-3850 performed admirably in games when using its on-board GPU. Arma II was playable at 1,280 x 720 with everything set to high, and while Bad Company 2 was just below playable on the same settings, lowering a couple of options would improve matters. The A8-3850 also performed well with our discrete GPU installed in the system – it outperformed the two Core i3s in both games at 1,920 x 1,080.

As with the A6-3650, you can overclock the A8-3850. However, FM1 overclocking is limited by the motherboard, and how the clock dividers for the SATA and USB buses are divided. Thankfully, the MSI A75MA-G55 we used for testing uncouples the SATA and USB buses, so we could adjust the Reference Clock without issue. We eventually settled on a 3.33GHz overclock using a 115MHz Reference Clock, while also boosting the GPU from 600MHz to 700MHz.

This enabled the A8-3850 to overtake the Pentium G620 and Pentium G840 in our Media Benchmarks, although it lagged behind the similarly priced Core i3 processors. We didn’t see much increase in frame rates from the on-board GPU, however. For media PCs and low-cost gaming rigs, the A8-3850 is great, as it’s the only sub-£100 CPU that can play demanding games smoothly.

Specifications

• Frequency 2.9GHz
  
• Core Husky
  
• GPU HD 6550D
  
• Number of cores 4 x physical
  
• Cache L1: 4 x 128KB, L2: 4 x 1MB
  
• Packaging Socket FM1
  
• Thermal design power (TDP) 100W