AMD Vision A8-3850 APU & Asus F1A75-M Pro Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. The AMD Lynx Platform3. The Asus F1A75-M Pro Motherboard4. The Asus F1A75-M Pro BIOS5. Testing Methodology6. Overclocking7. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 20118. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64-bit9. Synthetic: Super Pi 1.5 Mod10. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage11. Synthetic: 3DMark 1112. Synthetic: PCMark 713. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark14. Real World: Blu-Ray Playback with PowerDVD 1115. MKV Playback16. Real World: Flash HD Performance17. Real World: File Copying over USB3.018. Real World: Media Encoding with Cyberlink MediaEspresso19. Gaming: DiRT 320. Gaming: F1 201021. Gaming: Call of Duty Black Ops22. Gaming: Dead Space 223. Technical: Power Consumption24. Closing Thoughts25. View All Pages

A couple of weeks back, AMD released the notebook portion of their Llano platform, dubbed ‘Sabine', which we explained in detail over here.  This left many people wondering when the desktop variant of Llano would be released, and how it would perform compared to the latest offerings from Intel.

Today we are going to examine the top-end ‘Lynx' APU, the A8-3850, and compare it to Intel's i3-2105 CPU.  The Lynx platform has a completely redesigned socket, named FM1, meaning the APUs aren't backwards compatible with existing motherboards.  So we will also be looking at one of the first Lynx motherboards to market, the Asus F1A75-M Pro. This is a Micro-ATX model that is perfect for a small-form factor PC and should let us achieve a reasonable overclock.

The key feature of the Lynx platform is the powerful GPU that is integrated into the APU, promising solid ‘out of the box' performance without having to add a discrete graphics card.  But, for those who require a little more graphics grunt (and there will be many), you can still add a discrete graphics card alongside the APU.  In our tests we will be looking at how the APU performs both on its own and when combined with a discrete graphics card.

We will also be keeping a watchful eye on the power consumption of the Lynx test system as this is another key area of interest.  AMD have employed some clever power gating technology which is able to shut down individual cores when they are not required, so they don’t consume power.  This re-enforces our belief that the Lynx platform will be perfect for those looking to build a low-power HTPC.

AMD are releasing four different A-Series Lynx APUs today which are detailed in the table above.  The two A8 APUs feature the Radeon HD 6550D graphics with a clock of 600 MHz whereas the two A6 APUs have lower clocked 443 MHz Radeon HD 6530D graphics.  The four APU's do have a number of common features, though, including DirectX 11 support, Blu-Ray 3D support and OpenCL acceleration.

There are two key parts of a Lynx system, the APU and the Fusion Controller Hub (FCH).  The FCH is essentially a southbridge which handles all the I/O connectivity of the system.  There are two models available, the A75 and A55 which have different connectivity options.  The A75 is the one we will be testing today which supports SATA 3.0 (6 GB/s) and up to four USB3.0 ports.

Today's release includes four different APU models, two A6 and two A8 models which are all quad core.  AMD will be releasing the A4 series and E2 series dual core APUs at some point in the future.  In the A6 and A8 ranges there are both a 65W model and a 100W model.  The 65W model has a new feature called Turbo Core which lets the CPU cores and Radeon Cores to dynamically enter turbo mode to help maximise performance while staying within the thermal limits. We have the top-end A8-3850 APU for testing today which features the Radeon HD 6550D GPU alongside the four CPU cores.  The Radeon HD 6550D features 400 cores and has a clock speed of 600 MHz.

Even though the A8-3850 is a new chip, there is nothing revolutionary about it's architecture.  The CPU cores have very similar architecture to the current Phenom II X4 chips, with a few alterations here and there. This includes shrinking the manufacturing process to 32nm and ditching the L3 cache to make room for all four cores on the chip. They have doubled the amount of L2 cache to 1 MB per core, though, to help make up for this.

All four of the APUs support dual high definition displays without having to add a discrete graphics card.  They also feature AMDs third generation universal video decoder (UVD3) which provides hardware decoding support for various formats including H.264, MPEG2, DivX and Adobe Flash.

The APU itself looks very similar to the current range of Athlon II and Phenom II CPUs, although the pin layout is different and it uses a different socket (FM1).  The AMD Vision A8-3850 APU has a CPU clock speed of 2.9 GHz which is achieved using an APU frequency of 100 MHz and a multiplier of 29x.

Asus have adhered to their popular colour scheme with the F1A75-M Pro which consists of a black PCB with blue accenting.  This gives the board an attractive appearance and should make it easy to colour co-ordinate your system.  Asus have opted for a Micro-ATX form factor which makes the F1A75-M Pro a very versatile product as it can be used in everything from HTPC's to desktop tower builds.

As it's name suggests, the F1A75-M Pro features the A75M Fusion Controller Hub which is the more feature rich model.  This includes six SATA3.0 (6 GB/s) ports with RAID support and four USB3.0 ports.  Unlike previous AMD platforms, there isn't an integrated GPU on the motherboard as it is packaged into the CPU.

There are four expansion slots located on the board, consisting of two PCI Express x16 slots, a single PCI Express x1 slot and a legacy PCI slot.  We can't imagine that many people will install two graphics cards onto this motherboard but we appreciate the inclusion of a second PCI Express x16 slot as the PCI Express x1 slot may well be blocked by dual bay graphics cards.  This means there is room to add a dual slot graphics card in conjunction with a dedicated sound card and a TV tuner, should you want to use this board within an HTPC.

Even though the Lynx platform requires a slightly different CPU socket from previous AMD products, the cooler mountings are the same, meaning you can use any existing AM2+/AM3 cooler.  AMD have changed the design of the mounting slightly, so it is identical to the latest AM3+ platform.

There is a small heatsink covering a portion of the power regulation circuitry for the APU.  The rest is left bare, though, as Micro ATX boards aren't usually used for serious overclocking.  Along the top edge of the motherboard there is an 8-pin power connector for the APU.

The Asus F1A75-M Pro supports up to four DDR3 DIMMs, running at a maximum speed of 1866 MHz.  We found that our RAM was clocked down to 1333 MHz by default, though, and had to set it at the correct speed in the BIOS.

In the bottom right hand corner of the motherboard we find the six SATA3.0 connectors which are angled at 90 degrees to the motherboard to facilitate cable management.  Next to these we find the front panel connectors alongside four USB 2.0 front panel headers, a USB 3.0 front panel header and the HD Audio header.

We find a reasonable selection of I/O connections on the back panel which should suffice for the majority of people.  From left to right there is a PS2 connector, two USB 3.0 ports, a digital optical audio jack, HDMI, VGA and DVI connectors, two further USB 3.0 connectors, an RJ-45 ethernet jack, two USB 2.0 ports and six 3.5mm audio connections.  The only notable omissions are Firewire and eSATA which seem to be less important these days now USB 3.0 is gaining traction.

The Asus F1A75-M Pro features Asus' UEFI BIOS which provides a simple interface for configuring BIOS options.  The advanced provides all the other options that we would expect to see.

For our tests, we used a Coolit ECO A.L.C. to cool the AMD Vision A8-3850 APU and used an Antec TruePower 550W power supply for the system.  According to AMD, the Lynx platform can experience instability with some larger power supplies (750W+) due to the lower idle power so it is worth bearing this in mind when you're building a Lynx system.

Special thanks to Intel for supplying some hardware at late notice.

AMD Vision A8-3850 System

APU: AMD Vision A8-3850 2.9 GHz
Memory: 4 GB (2x 2GB) Kingston HyperX DD3 (1866 MHz)
Power Supply: Antec TruePower 550W
Motherboard: Asus F1A75-M Pro
Cooler: Coolit ECO A.L.C.
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Drive: Kingston SSDNow V100 128 GB
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Graphics (APU Only): AMD Radeon HD 6550D (512 MB Allocated)
Graphics (Dual Graphics Mode): AMD Radeon HD 6690D2 (6550D + AMD Radeon 6670) – tests in this mode are listed ‘DG'

Intel Core-i3 2105 System

CPU: Intel Core i3-2105 3.10 GHz
Memory: 4 GB (2x 2GB) Kingston HyperX DD3 (1333 MHz)
Power Supply: Antec TruePower 550W
Motherboard: Asus P8H67-M Pro
Cooler: Thermaltake Contac29 BP
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Drive: Kingston SSDNow V100 128 GB
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Graphics: Intel HD3000

Other Hardware

OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240 GB SSD
Patriot Torqx 2 in Akasa Elite S USB3.0 enclosure
Viewsonic VX2260WM 1920 x 1080 Monitor

Software:

SiSoft Sandra 2011 SP3
Cinebench R11.5
Super Pi Mod 1.5
3DMark 11
3DMark Vantage
PCMark 7
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink PowerDVD 11
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6
DiRT 3
F1 2010
Dead Space 2
Call of Duty: Black Ops

Intel sparked controversy after they took the decision to lock their latest Sandy Bridge i3 chips so they can't be overclocked.  But the AMD has a different philosophy and leaves the A8-3850 APU unlocked so we can squeeze a little extra performance from it.

AMD achieves the standard CPU clock speed of 2.9 GHz using an APU frequncy of 100 MHz and a CPU multiplier of 29x.  The graphics clock is also based on this APU frequency so it's overclocked when you bump it up a little.  The CPU multiplier can only be adjusted downwards from 29x so we chose to stick with this and increase the APU frequency as far as possible.  If you like, you can also reduce the CPU multiplier and increase the APU frequency further.  Even though you will end up with a similar CPU clock speed, the graphics core speed will be increased more because it has it's own independent multiplier.

So how much did we manage to squeeze from the A8-3850?

As you can see we achieved a stable overclock of 3.51 GHz using an APU Frequency of 121 MHz and a multiplier of 29x.  The graphics multiplier is fixed at 6x so the GPU was clocked to 726 MHz.  To achieve these frequencies we increased the voltage by 0.5V to 1.45V.  We did manage to achieve slightly higher stable clock speeds but not without putting over 1.5V through the chip which may well be risky long term. We try to aim for safe long term 24/7 clock speeds. Memory speeds increased to 1978mhz.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.  Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

•       Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)

•       Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)

•       Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)

•       Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)

•       Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

•       SMP – Multi-Processor

•       MC – Multi-Core

•       SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading

•       MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions

•       GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics

•       NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access

•       AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86

•       IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

In the Arithmetic test, the aggregate performance of the APU fell short of the Intel i3-2105 but was almost identical when overclocked.  This shows that you don't necessarily have to sacrifice integrated graphics power for CPU processing power.  In the aggregate multimedia test, we also saw similar performance from the APU when overclocked and from the Intel i3-2105 even though there were some variations in each specific test.  In all of the cryptography tests, the A8-3850 beat the i3-2105 easily thanks to excellent AES256 and SHA256 performance. Floating point performance in the multimedia test is also particularly strong.

Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

The A8-3850 APU has twice the number of cores when compared to the i3 2105, meaning it beats the Intel processor by a significant margin in the multi-core test.

Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU.

In Super Pi, the Intel i3-2105 beats the A8-3850 APU, managing to calculate Pi in about half the time.  Bear in mind that this application doesn't utilise all cores so the AMD benefit of double the physical cores is negated.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

DG stands for ‘dual graphics' mode.

In 3DMark Vantage, the A8-3850 beat the Intel i3-2105 easily in the overall test. The i3-2105 did win by a slight margin in the CPU test but these results were very close. When overclocked, the A8-3850 came out on top in both tests and therefore overall.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

As the Intel HD3000 graphics in the i3-2105 doesn't support DirectX 11, 3DMark 11 won't run with this setup.  The APU performed very well in this test, though, achieving a significant boost when overclocked and when configured in dual graphics mode.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

Unfortunately we weren't able to test the Intel system using PCMark 7 due to a glitch in the software which prevented the test from reaching completion.  We used the standard PCMark 7 suite for testing, outlined in the screenshot above.

These results give us a good indication of the real-world performance improvements of the AMD Lynx system when overclocked and when running in Dual Graphics mode.

A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition to rate the OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB MAX IOPS SSD from the onboard SATA 6GBps controller.

The difference in the tests between the two platforms is very closely run and is unlikely to make a huge difference in the real world.

Our good friends at Cyberlink kindly supplied the software for our BluRay and conversion tests.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 11 is one of the finest solutions for the BluRay experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the  Blu-Ray Disc of Independence Day.

Both the A8-3850 and Intel i3-2105 performed well in this test, achieving similar levels of performance.  On average, both systems were running below 10% CPU usage which leaves plenty of free CPU cycles for other tasks.

Many people who have media systems will be familiar with the Matroska (.mkv) file format which is often used for high definition video.  In this test we will be using VLC Media Player to play a 1080P MKV file while recording CPU usage using Performance Monitor.

In this test, the performance of the APU and Intel i3-2105 was very close again but the AMD APU achieved a slightly better average score.  This score improved a little more when the processor was overclocked.

Many people using this system will be enjoying Flash related content so we feel it is important to test with some of the more demanding material available freely online. Full hardware acceleration is enabled.

In this test, we also saw very similar results between the Intel and AMD systems but, again, the AMD hardware delivered slightly more impressive performance figures.

We are now going to test the USB 3.0 and USB2.0 transfer speeds, so we used one a nippy drive, a Patriot Torqx 2 128 GB SSD within the Akasa Elite S USB3.0 enclosure.

Close results showing decent scaling from USB 2.0 to USB 3.0 for both Intel and AMD systems.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1.09GB 720p MKV file (44mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version of this program.

In the media encoding test, the we saw decent performance improvements on both platforms when hardware encoding was enabled.  The Intel i3-2105 system surprised us by benefiting more from hardware encoding than the AMD systems. This could just be that the latest version of MediaEspresso has yet to receive optimisations for Llano.

DiRT 3 was only released about a month ago but has received much praise from gamers and reviewers across the globe.  It is the latest iteration of the Colin McRae Rally series, despite Codemasters dropping the Colin McRae branding.  It supports DirectX 11 which enhances detail and brings a number of other visual enhancements to the gaming experience.

The AMD Lynx system performed very well in this test, achieving playable framerates at 1080P with medium settings.  The Intel HD3000 graphics are running out of steam at these settings, a lower resolution would be needed for smooth gameplay.

F1 2010 is the first multi format high def Formula one title, having been in development for almost 2 and a half years now you can tell Codemasters are not messing around when it comes to releasing the best game they can. F1 2010 is packed with everything, from fine tuning your car setup, practising laps with goals to achieve, detailed stats, various difficulty settings for newbs and pros and even a helmet selection!

It's a similar story to DiRT 3 here.  The APU showed awesome performance in this game, especially when configured in dual graphics mode.

Call of Duty Black Ops is a first person shooter around 50 years ago and is the latest game in the Call of Duty franchise.  While many gamers favour the previous iteration, Modern Warfare 2, Black Ops is played by millions of gamers across the globe and doesn't require top end kit to achieve a playable experience.  So it is a perfect game to test with the AMD Vision A8-3850 APU.

Once again, the APU facilitated a very good overall gaming performance in both standalone mode and dual graphics mode.  We also managed to achieve slightly better FPS results when overclocking the GPU.

Dead Space 2 is a survival horror third-person shooter. The player controls Isaac Clarke from a third-person point of view, looking over the character’s right shoulder. The game features no HUD elements, relying on holograms projected from the player character and his weapons to show information such as messages and ammunition count, respectively. Player health and stasis is shown by a visual indicators located on Isaac’s back. Isaac must fight an alien organism that infects and takes control of human corpses, turning them into “Necromorphs”, mutating their bodies.

Necromorphs must be dismembered as the alien organism controls host bodies via tentacles extending into their limbs. Other, larger types of Necromorphs that cannot be dismembered will often have yellow, glowing pustules, indicating weak spots. Occasionally, when an enemy gets close enough to Isaac, they will grab a hold of him, and the player must repeatedly press a key to fend off the enemy, with failure to do so leading to death of the player character.

The APU did struggle slightly as there were a couple of drops in framerate but the overall experience was fine.  When in dual graphics mode and overclocked, these issues weren't noticeable and the performance was consistent throughout.

We are monitoring power consumption at the plug using a Plug in Power and Energy monitor.  For the idle tests, we left the system idling at the desktop for 5 minutes, after which we recorded the power consumption.  Moving on to the Blu-Ray test, we measured the power consumption while playing Independence day.  For the gaming test, we loaded the system using DiRT 3.

The power consumption figures recorded by the Lynx system are nothing short of impressive.  Even though the Intel system appears to consume less power overall, we have to consider that the AMD system has an extremely capable GPU built in. 87 watts at load when gaming, compared to 102 watts from the AMD system under the same environment. Those of you who have read the full review will remember the AMD system was playable with Dirt 3 at 1080p, the Intel system couldn't even break 20 fps at the same settings.

AMD may not be able to compete against Sandy Bridge at the top end of the market but the new AMD Lynx platform certainly shows that they can compete in the mainstream market, where the volume sales happen.

We put the AMD Vision A8-3850 APU up against the similarly priced Intel Core-i3 2105 processor and found that the two offer a closely matched level of CPU processing performance but the difference in graphics processing power was huge.  In our tests, the A8-3850 APU was able to handle many of the leading engines at 1080p, which is truly astonishing for an integrated GPU.  The Intel HD3000 graphics processor in the Core-i3 2105 CPU just couldn't keep up and isn't ideal for powering modern game engines.

Another advantage of the A8-3850 APU is that it can be easily overclocked.  We managed to achieve a stable overclock of 3.5GHz (20%) with the Asus F1A75-M Pro motherboard without much effort. This reaps real world benefits as we documented improved frame rates throughout all games and a decent boost in all the benchmarks.  Those who crave even more graphics performance can add a discrete GPU into the system to enable dual graphics mode.  Enabling Dual Graphics improved gaming performance considerably, boosting framerates by over 75% with our specific tests.  Remember, the discrete GPU can be added at a later date, leaving the path open for future proofing.

The AMD Lynx platform also has connectivity capabilities that aren't even present on some of the highest-end Intel Sandy Bridge motherboards. Such as support for six SATA 3.0 connections and four USB 3.0 connections (only with the A75 FCH).

Even though the overall power consumption of the Intel system was slightly lower, the AMD A8-3850 has a higher TDP of 100W rather than the Intel's 65W.  AMD have engineered considerably more graphics power into the overall design, which is more than worth the few extra pence on the electricity bill over the course of a year.

As always, price is a very important factor to consider when judging a product in this sector.  AMD advise us that the Vision A8-3850 APU will be hitting the market at around $135 which makes it very competitively priced indeed.  It dominated the benchmarks and highlighted the strong graphics capabilities, even at high resolution with decent image quality settings.  We don't yet have the final pricing for the Asus F1A75-M Pro motherboard but we can't imagine it would differ much in price from the $130 Asus P8H67-M Evo motherboard that we used to test the Intel Core-i3 2105.

We think that the Lynx platform is perfect for those who want to build a powerful HTPC or everyday PC on a budget.  The Vision A8-3850 APU is capable of playing the latest games without struggling and can perform all those menial every day tasks without adding much to your electricity bill.

Pros:

• Discrete Graphics Performance
• Great value
• Easy to overclock
• Friendly on the electricity bill
• Dual Graphics support

Cons:

• None

KitGuru says: An impressive platform that offers amazing performance at a great price

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