Yoyotech Piranha A866se review

We’ve seen netbooks and low-power laptops using AMD’s Llano chips, but the Yoyotech Piranha A866se marks the first appearance in the PC Pro Labs of one of these accelerated processing units, or APUs, in a desktop PC.

Yoyotech has chosen AMD’s 2.9GHz A8-3850 processor, and has boosted its speed with a small overclock to 3.15GHz. An overall benchmark score of 0.71 is slightly better than the 0.67 we’ve previously recorded from the same chip at stock speed.

However, Llano’s application performance looks weak next to similarly priced rivals: it’s behind the Phenom processor of the £599 inc VAT Yoyotech Dragon F-58, which scored 0.8, and miles behind the Core i5-equipped Palicomp Phoenix i5 Destiny, which scored 1.1 for its £650 price. Raw performance is not Llano’s strong point.

Far better is the graphical side of things, and that’s because the onboard chip has some help. The big plus for Llano is its ability to use integrated chips and discrete graphics cards in tandem, and here the modest power of the integrated Radeon HD 6550D is boosted by a mid-range Radeon HD 6670 graphics card. It works well, as demonstrated by our Crysis tests.

The A8-3850 working on its own averaged a perfectly good 34fps in our Medium quality test at 1,366 x 768, and after enabling both chips in CrossFireX that rose to an impressive 56fps. That teamwork of cores also lifts this AMD system to higher settings and resolutions: our High quality test at 1,920 x 1,080 completed at 37fps with both cores, and scored 25fps when we upped the quality to Very High.

That puts it right between its two recent price rivals. The Palicomp, with its Radeon HD 5670, scored just 25fps in the High quality test, while the Yoyotech Dragon F-58 scored 38fps in the Very High benchmark thanks to its Radeon HD 5850.