AMD A6-3650 Pro Reviews

AMD's second-rung APU is the A6-3650, which currently retails for £89. Based on the range-topping A8-3850, which itself is barely over £100, the number-two part sacrifices around 10 per cent CPU speed and, on paper, about 25 per cent GPU power in order to meet a more attractive price point. Our benchmarks show that, unsurprisingly, the A6-3650 isn't as quick as the A8 part. And while we lament the architectural snips made by AMD, especially in terms of graphics, the pragmatic truth is that they don't have a hugely detrimental effect; A6-3650 is good enough to provide reasonable CPU and iGPU performance in a wide variety of tasks. Stress the CPU cores and the '3650 is good enough to match, and beat, a price-equivalent Intel chip, which is key, and the HD 6530D graphics run rings around Intel's. We'd normally finish off by saying it's worth paying the extra £15 for the A8-3850 if you want to go down the CPU-and-GPU route. This time, however, understanding that every penny counts in a budget build, that very same £15 saving becomes important. Indeed, it provides the A6-3650's raison d'etre. AMD's A-series APUs make a lot of sense if you're after a cover-all-bases budget build, especially when (inevitably) paired with a SATA 6Gbps- and USB 3.0-supporting FM1 motherboard. Take all that into account and the A6-3650's on-paper specification shortfall is mitigated by solid mainstream performance and a compelling street price.

The AMD A6-3650 APU is currently available for about $119 on-line. For what is a relatively small investment for a low-power quad-core processor, the A6-3650 offers decent x86 performance with a good performing DX-11 class graphic processor. Pair a chip like this with a low-priced A75 chipset-based motherboard and a nice 8GB memory kit and you’ve got yourself an inexpensive foundation for a casual gaming, home theater, or general purpose PC, for under $250. There’s a lot of value in a Llano-based system currently, but looking back at the numbers it’s clear there is significantly more performance to be had with a modest additional investment in something like a Core i3 with a discrete mid-range discrete GPU. If you’re looking to build a full-featured, low-power, affordable rig with a DX11-compatible Radeon, though, building around AMD's Llano definitely has some merit. The platform’s low power consumption and graphics capabilities make it a good fit for quiet computing or HTPC applications and overall performance should be “good enough” for a large percentage of users.

There's no doubt about it, with these new Lynx desktop chips, AMD has seriously upped the ante when it comes to integrated graphics performance, especially at the price the A6-3650's been pitched at. The dual graphics option is also interesting, because it allows for some fairly intensive gameplay without having to break the bank for the discrete graphics card. One of the nice surprises of the APU is its ease of overclocking and how far it will go without having to get your hands too dirty in the Bios. We were impressed with the AMD A8-3850, and similarly the cheaper A6-3650 doesn't disappoint either

Its graphics performance lags behind the A8-3850, but the A6-3650 is just as fast in Crossfire mode and not far off in 2D applications.

If you're building a new budget-friendly system from scratch that will be used for medium-level gaming, HD movie watching or a long list of other seemingly benign tasks, this new Lynx platform is a no-brainer. The A6-3650 is a terrific all-in-one chip that provides unmatched value when you consider that the integrated GPU is a whole heck of a lot faster than a $45-50 Radeon HD 6450. Intel's lower-end Sandy Bridge models are absolutely faster in CPU-centric benchmarks, but when you take an overall look it is hard not to come to the conclusion that Llano's graphics capabilities more than makes up for its processing shortcomings. In other words, whereas most users likely will not notice that the A6-3650 is slightly slower than another processor in 2D applications, they will notice that it has much better framerates, decoding abilities and GPU computing performance. To us, that equates to a better overall computing experience.

The AMD A6-3650 APU is a very capable processor that can do anything you ask it to and it overclocks very well as our chip got up to 3.8GHz!