AMD Athlon 5150 Kabini - cat, Jaguar or more fun?

[FlanK3r]

Im tetsing for review now Athlon 5150. This is from my point the best price/performance ration for AM1. Basic clock is 1600 MHz (top model 5350 has 2050 MHz, this different could be visible in practice, but 5150 has still OK performance). The RAM IMC support is 1600 MHz DDR3. Not bad, but you will see later. And iGPU has the core clock 400 MHz. For older oldschool games its OK. As Quake III. Quake IV, Counter Strike, Battlefield 2 or modern Torchlight.

New benchrig for small machine


And new HyperX memory Fure


But, what happens, if the right guy has the right motherboard? This motherboard is Asus AM1I-A.


BIOS is simply perfect for some fun.

This is teraser. 1600 MHz CPU and DDR3? No way...I wanna more... 1984 MHz at CPU and DDR3 the same! And still stock voltage of CPU

[filmbot]

Assuming this is with C1 or Turbo on? Didn't realize they bumped NB frequency up also, makes sense now that I think about it.

[FlanK3r]

yes, I have C1 active for idle...NB are donwlock in idle too. In load are doubles.

[ilkkahy]

I insist you to stick a peltier to it Flank3r !!! I dont know why but seeing that setup gave me some nostalgic feelings... maybe its the cooler or something..

[tiborrr]

I was looking for this kind of information all over the internet. So you're telling me that this particular ASUS board can OC small Kabinis? Can you show me some BIOS screens and options? Is there any clockgen software available as well?

[FlanK3r]

OK, no problem, there is it:

[tiborrr]

Fantastic! What are maximum BIOS settings here? How high can you raise the APU clock? Is the PCIE bus speed locked?

[i found nemo]

flanker. i really do love your dedication.

[Dr. Vodka]

With the bclk that high I suppose they've locked pcie and other buses. Nice! 124 mhz on the 5350 would be 2.5 ghz.. It should be able to go that high. Powerful little thing, you could say.

Thanks a lot for showing us which motherboard is the one to get It's also good to see that the 5350 is not exactly needed this way.

[brains11]

Fun! Small! The performance increases games with the oc ram has to be fairly large. Those temps with that tiny nostalgic cpu heatsink?

Looking forward to more.

[Darakian]

Nice work. What are the thermals and power draw like at 2112Mhz?

[vario]

Nice work, hey Flanker How far this kabini goes STABLY ?Also do you think you are blck restricted or this is just the silicon, how good is the voltage scaling.And you should Do a Stock/OC comparison in few games

[imamage]

I just saw a local store in Hong Kong have stock with Athlon 5350 and Sempron 3850 today

Too bad no AM1 mainboard available so it's pointless to just have the APU......

I checked with my pal in store and sadly they said the MB dealer did not stock ANY AM1 board
maybe later of the month (after Easter holiday) will have a few.

I wish the ASUS dealer have this board in stock (But highly unlikely)

BTW , I am kinda pissed when I am quite happy the local AMD vendor have Kabini Desktop in stock so quickly.

[Lightman]

I was looking for this kind of information all over the internet. So you're telling me that this particular ASUS board can OC small Kabinis? Can you show me some BIOS screens and options? Is there any clockgen software available as well?

In that case you might like to know that PCLab.pl in their AM1 review managed to up bclk to 120MHz and their 5350 clocked to 2.45GHz at stock voltage
IGP should get boost as well when bclk is overclocked so possibly GCN cores were clocked 720MHz. Sadly they did not report any scores from OC other than stating that it was rock solid.

[FlanK3r]

Next stage:
http://valid.canardpc.com/14xnw5

[FlanK3r]

And Cinebench at stable settigns

[Daveburt714]

Hi FLank3r!
Thanks for running all these tests...

I noticed the solid spot on my 5350's HSF doesn't come close to covering the whole heat spreader...
The small circle at the center is only about the size of a US dime.

Just wondered if you wiped the factory stuff off and applied the TIM to the CPU heat spreader instead?
I know their only 25w chips, but it seems like that should give a little better cooling performance.

Thanks,
Dave

[FlanK3r]

Dave: no, I used AMD tim from BOX cooler. The CPU is cool. No problem with temps. I have still voltage limits for higher clock (I hope). The problem could be limitation at APUNB or iGPU clocks.

[FlanK3r]

So, Im done with little baby Kabini and Asus AM1-I A. Great board and good small CPU

How is it stable? I got stable settings at 132 MHz BCLK!
The power consumption in load is only 5 W higher than with stock settings . Lets go to OC stable results:

AIDA AES:


AIDA Memory-nice improvement


Cinebench R15


Cinebench R11.5


Cinebench R10


Winrar, wow, over 2000 KB/s!


3D Mark11 Performance test


And now some fun with benchmarks (not fully stable PC in OCCT)
PiFast


Wprime 1024M


Cinebench R15 at 2303 MHz!


Cinebench R11.5 at 2303 MHz


Superpi 2303 MHz


Max clock - 2367 MHz (with +1 Mhz BCLK I had issues with SATA/graphics outputs)

[vario]

So, Im done with little baby Kabini and Asus AM1-I A. Great board and good small CPU

How is it stable? I got stable settings at 132 MHz BCLK!
...

Very nice work flanker!
And nice results also, two things, you think you were BCLK constrained ? Or was this CPU`s fault.
Second those results would talk a lot more if you wrote down stock scores beside them :-/ .Theres not a lot info about AM1 on the net.
Get a 5350! :P

[Dr. Vodka]

It seems to be more of a cpu bottleneck than what the mobo is able to do, because of the low multiplier. 132x21=2772 mhz with the 5350, and 148x21=3100 mhz. Of course kabini won't do 3 ghz, but 2.5 ghz is certainly doable, I think, given enough voltage.

But then it draws my attention to see 1.4v to stabilize superpi at 2.3 ghz, while he's using only 1.2v to do a cinebench run at the same clocks. Can the voltages reported by cpuz be trusted?

Nonetheless, it's exciting to see almost a 50% overclock in the lower end parts. Nice!

[FlanK3r]

vario: full review will be soon...With graphs etc. I think, for higher BCLK I need (maybe) IDE mode or somehow get down the dividier for iGPU.

Default settings is 1.3 V for this little baby. CPU-Z show it OK in load, in idle are different volatges between 0.8 up 1.22V

[Kai Robinson]

Is it possible to throw an older Athlon 64 x2 / Core2 Duo into the mix to see how they compare?

[MikeMurphy]

I'd love to see how high the clocks go with a higher multiplier.

[[XC] Lead Head]

27.2 Second Super Pi 1M at 2.3GHz? Nearly as fast as my FX-6300 @ ~3.6GHz.