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Amd A8 3850 Driver For Mac



Actually I want to run VMware Workstation on my Windows 8.1 PC but it says error that only AMD-V supports virtualization. But I am Unable to See/Use AMD-V on MSI A75 Motherboard with AMD A8-3850 APU in BIOS Settings Page.




Amd A8 3850 Driver For Mac



With four SKUs in the initial Llano-based desktop portfolio, a zero-hour revelation that the 65 W A8-3800 and A6-3600 won't be available until an undisclosed date narrows the family down to two models: A8-3850 and A6-3650, both 100 W parts. As a result, it won't be possible to test Turbo Core functionality on Llano until AMD addresses the availability of its lower-power offerings.


Once we've kind of looked at the new A-Series APU line-up, in a while we'll get a bit more specific with the A8-3850 we have on hand today before we get into the really fun stuff and start overclocking it on our ASUS F1A75-V Pro Motherboard.


At launch we should see four A-Series desktop APUs launch; within that we've got two Radeon based GPU solutions on offer with the A8-3850 and A8-3800 both offering HD 6550 level graphics, and the A6-3650 and A6-3600 both offering HD 6530 level graphics. As far as features go, both models offer us DirectX 11 support and UVD support which you saw back on the previous page.


As for the model we're dealing with, AMD has sent us the A8-3850 APU. This is currently the top A-Series APU model coming in at 2.9GHz and utilizing the HD 6550D for Graphics. The overall physical design of the CPU doesn't really bring anything new to the table with the same Pin Grid Array (PGA) being used over the Land Grid Array (LGA) that Intel use. As for the number of pins, the new FM1 socket has a total of 937; this is a whole one pin less than the Phenom II which carries 938.


We'll be covering our A8-3850 in both stock form and overclocked which we'll discuss in just a second, but for good measure we've included the Phenom II X4 965 and Phenom II X6 from AMD to see how the new APU goes today while also including an i3 2120, i5 2500k and i7 2600k.


The multiple CPU types mean we've got a couple of different motherboards on hand. For our Intel processors we're using the new Maximus IV Gene-Z which is based on the Z68 chipset and we're yet to review. Keep your eyes peeled for that review in the next few weeks. For our Phenom based CPUs, we're using the ASUS Crosshair V Formula based on the 990FX chipset. As for the A8-3850, that's going into our ASUS F1A75-V Pro based on the A75 chipset which we have detailed a few pages back.


On the right hand side you can see our overclock. What we ended up doing was dropping the multiplier down to 28x and increasing the bus speed to 125MHz. This resulted in our A8-3850 running at 3.5GHz at 1.5v. We didn't want to go too crazy with voltage and because we're dealing with some new kind of architecture, we didn't want to mess around too much with them either. We figured a 600MHz clock is a nice increase, though, bringing us into the 3GHz+ range. We did get around the 3.6GHz mark at 1.5v, but CINEBENCH actually didn't want to play nice so we pulled it back just a little.


Well, that just about covers everything related to the testing side of things. So with all that said, let's not delay any longer and see just what the A8-3850 can do for us in our lineup of benchmarks today.


Under PCMark 7 we can see that the A8-3850 sits towards the bottom which doesn't come as too much of a surprise. What is a surprise, though, is just how close it is when compared to the other AMD models. We can see that the PCMark 7 score is higher than the other AMD offerings and i3 2120 when overclocked.


Having a look at the CPU performance, we can again see that performance from the A8-3850 is a little behind the Phenom II offerings. When we clock it up to 3.6GHz, though, we can see performance rivals the X4 965 and comes within throwing distance of the X6.


Intel have done a fantastic job with memory performance over the last few years, but even more so in the Sandy Bridge platform. Comparing the A8-3850 to the Phenom II CPUs, though, we see because we've got 1866MHz DDR support verse 1600MHz DDR on our Phenom II chips, that results in some added memory performance which is of course appreciated.


We can again see that memory performance favors the Intel platform. Looking at our AMD chips, the A8-3850 lags a little at stock compared to the other chips. It does manage to pull ahead when overclocked.


PassMark was having some issues with the CPU test on the Intel platform, so we have removed the results for them here; instead we've got our AMD ones. You can see A8-3850 performance is pretty strong with it at stock performing better than the X4 in certain areas. Overclocked, we manage to see a nice boost and it helps out perform the X4 which is running at stock speeds.


Getting into some real world benchmarks, we can see that the A8-3850 at stock of course lags behind the "k" offering CPUs. Compared to the i3 2120, though, the CPU that would be considered the main competition for this, finds the A8 offering come out ahead. With greater OC potential on offer from the A8-3850, we see that performance is able to jump even further ahead of the i3 2120.


Looking at Lightroom and the times of converting 1GB of *.CR2 images down to 23MB of JPEGs, we see that at stock the A8-3850 and i3 2120 aren't that far apart from each other. Overclocked, we can see that not only does the gap close, but the A8-3850 manages to sneak a second ahead of the i3 2120.


In the performance Preset we can see that we're hitting a bit of a CPU limitation. The same is seen in the higher resolution X preset, but not as clear. Compared to the i3 2120, performance is very similar; overclocking again helps the A8-3850 take the lead.


Aliens vs. Predator paints a different picture to what we saw in 3DMark 11. Here you can see that between all the platforms performance is identical. This is great news for AMD as what it tells us is that in a situation where the pressure is being placed on the video card and the CPU isn't coming in to play, the A8-3850 can keep up with the big boys.


At load it comes as no surprise that we see all the platforms draw similar power levels, it just differs slightly because of the CPU being used. Idle, though, we can see the power of the A8-3850. Even with a high end card like the HD 6970 installed, we're getting only 66 watt of load which is fantastic.


Compared to the high end Sandy Bridge processors, the A8-3850, as you would expect, performs below them. Compared to the i3 2120 which is that more mainstream processor for that mid-range market, performance is very interesting. You can go through the synthetic benchmarks and you will see the i3 2120 really just jump out ahead of the A8-3850.


Move away from the synthetic benchmark, though, and get into real world situations and the picture becomes quite different. Aliens vs. Predator sees the HD 6970 perform just as well on the A8-3850 as it does on any other platform. Media Espresso also sees the conversion time on our A8-3850 come in faster than the i3 2120 and CINEBENCH also sees the A8-3850 come out ahead.


When you start to move into the real world benchmarks you can see at times these massive synthetic scores mean very little. You can look at AIDA64 and say there's so much more performance on offer from the i3 2120 over the A8-3850, especially at the L2 Cache level. You then fire up something like Media Espresso, though, and you see that those massive numbers translate into the i3 2120 coming in a minute behind the A8-3850.


Something else that's so important to remember in regards to the i3 2120 is that while the "Sandy Bridge" platform has a wonderful name when it comes to overclocking, those results of 5.2GHz+, are only capable from a more expensive "k" series CPU. When we looked at the i3 2100, because we only have BCLK to play with, we got from 3.1GHz to 3.185GHz. On the other hand, we managed to get to 3.5GHz easily on our A8-3850 and at 1.5v we even had 3.6GHz working on most benchmarks, but not all. Companies have showed us the A8-3850 running at 1.55v with air cooling, though, which means we've probably got a bit more headroom on top of the numbers we've got here.


From a CPU side of things, the A8-3850 does perform extremely well. In the synthetic world we see it perform strong against the likes of the Phenom II X4 and when we get into real world performance where we concentrate on the CPU side of things, we can see that again performance is also very strong. The CPU performance side of things is what we would say is only one side of the three that AMD offer with the Llano platform and Fusion on a whole.


Due to that, we haven't scored the APU today because really, we're not so much just reviewing the A8-3850, but we're reviewing the platform on a whole and such an important part of that platform is the video performance. This is an area AMD expect to be extremely strong in when compared to its competition Intel and going off the specifications we would tend to believe them. There's only one way to find out for sure, though, and that's to benchmark it.


AMD has plans to ship many different A-Series APUs, which are broken down into three key families. High-end models will belong to the A8-Series and will be quad-core processors that utilize the Radeon HD 6550D graphics core operating at 600MHz. The A8-3850 runs at 2.9GHz and the A8-3800 does its work at 2.4GHz, but that speed is boosted via AMD's Turbo Core technology and can therefore operate at up to 2.7GHz. The A8-3850 has a TDP rating of 100 watts, whereas the A8-3800 is rated at just 65 watts.


Getting asymmetric CrossFire working was a breeze. ASRock's BIOS was setup by default to allow for a secondary discrete GPU to function in dual-graphics mode, all I had to do was install a Radeon HD 6570. My monitor remained plugged into the motherboard and the driver handled the rest:


Today we are going to be taking a look at the flagship A-series APU the A8-3850. This processor integrates the CPU, GPU and Northbridge functions into a single chip designed to be faster and more efficient than having them as separate components. The A8-3850 is clocked at 2.9 GHz and manufactured using a 32nm process. The A8-3850 features a new Socket FM1 for the new design and supports DDR3 memory up to 1866MHz, has a 512KB L1 cache and a 1MB per core L2 cache for a total 4MB L2 cache. This processor is designed for mainstream systems looking for the best processing power for the money. Set to be priced at around $135 for the processor, this is going to be a platform destined to make a name for itself. The graphics core integrated into the APU is the Radeon HD 6550D series which has 400 Radeon cores, 20 Texture units, 5 SMIDs, and is clocked at a fast 600MHz. The peak GPU compute power for the IGP is 480GFLOPS and offers full DirectX 11 support. All that in a little chip? Amazing isn't it? Well if you are as excited as I am, how about we dive in and start off with a look at the APU. 2ff7e9595c


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