The A4-3400 APU provides a good user experience for office, internet and multi media tasks with little fault. I came across no real issue through my day to day tasks and I was happy to find that it could even play Killing Floor at max settings with an average of 56FPS with some drops to 25FPS (1920x1080!!). It is true that this Entry level Desktop APU is not really for gaming but what it does do, is offer a capable computing solution that is versatile enough to provide a modern PC experience.



As a bundle, the GIGABYTE motherboard offers on par performance with its A75 brother and the AMD memory is a good choice to be used with this platform as it gives ease of setup to the user. Though the quality of the motherboard is not in question, it does feel that the options the A55 chipset motherboards offer is limited and unappealing, not many take full use of the 6x SATA 2.0 ports available on the Hudson D2, preferring to offer just 4, nor do they take full advantage of the 14x USB 2.0 available. I see little reason why someone should chose the A55 platform over the A75. While the direct competitor to this bundle is the Intel H61 platform with a G620 pentium, let's not forget that the new B75 platform is available from Intel for little over the cost of what you would pay for an A55 motherboard.

Overall if you are looking for a budget build and are happy to trade off a little CPU performance for a boost in the GPU department, the A4-3400 offers low power, dual core goodness with entry level discrete graphics that enriches modern computing needs by accelerating applications, internet browsing and video playback, giving it the responsive performance that people have come to expect from a modern desktop PC.





Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net. Thanks to AMD for providing today’s review sample.