Y'all Should Avoid "Bristol Ridge" CPUs

If y'all can't already tell, we're not impressed with the A12-9800 and we strongly recommend yous avoid purchasing any of the Bristol Ridge CPUs. Nosotros've thought long and hard and nosotros tin can't come up upwards with one valid reason or situation where these CPUs make an ounce of sense.

You wouldn't purchase whatsoever of them equally placeholders, which makes about as much sense every bit using a Kaby Lake-X CPU equally a placeholder. Sure the Athlon X4 950 is inexpensive at $60, but it delivers the exact the same functioning as the A12-9800 with a discrete GPU. The G4560 can exist had for around $90 and it's worlds improve in every single manner when compared to the Athlon.

In club to use the Athlon X4 950 or the A12-9800 you need to purchase a new AM4 motherboard forth with some new DDR4 memory. Allow'southward say you become with an ultra cheap A320 board for $50 and 8GB of DDR4 for $70, that means the A12-9800 upgrade package will set yous dorsum $230. The same motherboard and retention combo with the Ryzen 3 1200 plus the GeForce GT 1030 volition price $300, then that'due south thirty% more than money for over twice the CPU power, and twice the GPU power.

Meanwhile, if you opt for the Athlon X4 950 and GT 1030 combo instead, that'south even worse as the Ryzen 3 1200 with the same discrete graphics menu costs just 20% more than.

We haven't touched on overclocking and bluntly we're non going to bother. Even if you could push button the A12-9800 to something insane like 5.5GHz it would still suck. Of grade, it tin't operate at that frequency. We've heard of people getting up to 4.8GHz and at that rate it would nonetheless struggle to keep pace with the G4560 while consuming three times more power.

Faster retentivity volition no doubt help, assuming the retentiveness controller can handle it, but even DDR4-4000 retentivity isn't going to save these Bristol Ridge CPUs. With the same DDR4-2400 memory as the G4560, nosotros saw less than half the available bandwidth.

There's simply no saving grace here. AMD's intention was to feed the OEM channels with these rubbish chips and at present they're buying a little time before the Zen-based APUs get in next year. In our opinion they've but tainted the AM4 platform with an compages we'd all like to forget about and I would have thought AMD felt the same way.

Shopping shortcuts:

  • AMD A12-9800 - Amazon, Newegg

Anyway, our advice is to not buy these chips and instead wait for the real deal. We expect the Zen-based APUs to be something quite special and they will no uncertainty give Intel quite a few headaches.

Pros: Cipher. There'south no apparent reason to purchase these Bristol Ridge parts. Stay tuned for Zen-based APUs.

Cons: Poor performance and overall value compared to options such as the Ryzen 3 1200 and Pentium G4560.