AMD A4 3400 APU Review

The AMD Llano A4 3400 isn't going to appeal to the high performance audience, but for those people who want a basic, cost effective processor with graphics acceleration then we feel it has a lot to offer.

Ultimately it has been designed for those on a strict budget, and enthusiast users who desire a system with very low power consumption. The A4 3400 is a very tempting proposition due to the incredibly low power drain and efficiency under load.

Additionally, the A4 3400 is it well suited for a home server environment as it delivers solid all-round performance and produces minimal heat. For a farm of low cost machines, it really does have advantages, especially as the asking price is only £49.98 in the United Kingdom today. It is significantly more powerful than the Intel ATOM quad core processors we have reviewed in the last year.

Sadly, our system build did not show any appreciable performance gain by the addition of a Radeon 6450 in Hybrid Crossfire, to support the A4 3400 APU. Future driver updates from AMD may improve the performance of the APU/GPU Hybrid Crossfire combination however.

We wouldn't imagine many people buying an A4 3400 would demand substantial graphical processing power. For those that do, then there is always the option to add a higher performance discrete card at a later date. We feel a HD7750 would make a capable, relatively low cost upgrade if you wanted to smooth out the frame rates a little at 720p. The VTX3D HD7750 for instance is less than £80, and will assuredly bump overall gaming performance to the next level.

AMD are currently pushing the new A4 range hard and some stores have dedicated pages to supporting compatible components. This page over at DABS for instance highlights a wide range of motherboards to suit the A4 APU, some of which cost less than £50 inc vat. £100 for a new processor including the motherboard really is hard to ignore, especially when you factor in the very low power consumption.

This is clearly the ultimate ‘green' system setup.

Pros:

• Low power consumption.
• Cool and quiet.
• Very competitive pricing.
• Good ‘all-rounder'.
• Less than £50.

Cons:

• Not the ideal solution for playing games at High definition resolutions.
• Hybrid Crossfire performance is currently disappointing.

Kitguru says: It may not set the performance charts alight, but the extremely competitive price point, miserly power consumption and low heat output means it will be ideal for a huge variety of tasks. Highly recommended.

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