New Motherboard

Slow-sync flash.. for the arts!

For the past week, I have been going on about about how Daddy Christmas sent me down a big "Meccano set" to bolt together, in essence: a Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4 motherboard [gigabyte.com] and AMD A10 5800K APU [amd.com]. I won't bother to review either because there are plenty of sites out there with reviews that actually know what they're talking about. I will just agree with what the general consensus is about the A10: not the best CPU in the world, not the best GPU in the world, not the most low-power microprocessor in the world, but probably the best jack-of-all-trades chip currently out there.

It's a step-up from what I was running before: a 7 year old Pentium D. While it wasn't always struggling to get the job done, it was in danger of burning the house down during the Summer months.

And now some thermal images, just because I could. On the left, an image when the machine is off but with the motherboard still drawing power, and on the right, the A10's 4-cores at "full load" ("full load" defined as: two 1080p videos playing and WinRar compressing some treasures).



The hottest parts were the power distribution unit, and the thingies and capacitors around the APU.



At the moment the exhaust temperature is 22 degrees, the old pentium D would be 6 or 7 degrees hotter. The room is noticeably chillier, so the new machine does have it's disadvantages I guess.