AMD A8 3850 

The AMD A8-3850 clearly uses more power at load than the Intel Core i3-2105, but as you saw in the benchmarks the AMD A8-3850 also had slightly better performance across the board.

The AMD A8-3850 APU has a subscore of 7.3, which is very impressive for a $135 processor!

We also ran HyperPi to 1M places and got a score of 22.601 seconds, which is 11% faster than the default score of 22.601 seconds.

Benchmark Results: PCMark 7 favors the Intel system as the Core i3-2105 processor had an overall score of 4160 versus an overall score of 3575 on the AMD A8-3850 APU.

The A8-3850 has a 2.9GHz quad-core CPU, 600MHz GPU w/ 400 Radeon cores, 4MB of L2 cache and a 100W TDP.

We also posted a review on the ASUS F1A75-M Pro motherboard today, so be sure to read it here if you'd like to know more about these boards.

With the gaming benchmarks it quickly becomes obvious just how much of a benefit the AMD Dual Graphics functionality is compared to the still rather impressive stock speeds.

Technical specifications and impressive engineering feats are all well and good, AMD has always been pretty good at creating decent technical achievements, but not so hot at delivering performance product.

The AMD A8-3850 was able to perform better in the Sandra Cryptography benchmark.

Second, the APU lets you access AMD's new Dual Graphics technology to "combine" the power of a discrete GPU with the integrated graphics; this only works if your system is configured correctly on both the software (you'll need the AMD Vision Engine Control Center running) and hardware (the video card must be relatively low-end, and if you're only using one DIMM of memory, the whole thing might not work) sides, so be sure your PC meets all the requirements before trying it out.

It's an Accelerated Processing Unit, essentially that means it's a combo chip combining both traditional CPU and GPU parts in one die.

First, if you have a discrete GPU installed, the APU will by default function as the boot-up video adapter, meaning any displays connected to a video card won't work until Windows loads the proper video drivers.

AMD's focus however is far more based upon jamming discrete class graphics into the same component as a decent quad-core processing part.

That marriage was not fully consummated until this year, and Intel's January release of its mainstream second-generation Core (aka "Sandy Bridge") chips meant AMD's competitor brought together CPU and GPU functionality within a single die first (but just barely).

Results: The Intel Core i3-2105 'Sandy Bridge' processor was able to perform better than the AMD A8-3850 'Llano' processor in the Processor Multimedia benchmark.