The BIOS does not support any over-/underclocking or undervoltage capabilities which means the CPU is also locked. You can just enable or disable the CPU sleep mode which does saves a tiny bit of energy, but also does reduce performance a bit. While the CPU officially only supports 1066MHz the latest BIOS we got enabled 1333MHz which does boost performance.




The most use for such an APU besides surfing is of course as an HTPC. With the UVD3 engine it should do all the basic needs. You can just forget about 3D blu-ray, because the APU does not support HDMI 1.4 which is required. We are not fans of the 3D-hype and which of course should be called "fake-3D", so it won't bother us. Also there are restrictions with blu-rays which are encoded with 60fps. The GPU is too weak to manage that, but 24fps is not a problem at all.

Here we played the intro of Spiderman 3 which is very strainful due to the high encoding bitrate of about 45-60Mb/s. With about 38-50% CPU utilization, there is enough room to do other stuff, but who wants that anyways.

More demaning is 1080p with flash. We used a movie trailer on youtube and it goes even higher than a blu-ray disc, which points to a problem with decoding support by flash for AMD graphics, but we are confident they will sort out the problems in the near feature. Regardsless of the higher CPU utilization it was playable without hiccups.

If you have to happen some 1080p material in form of a .mkv file which is normally only encoded with about 10Mb/s then you will not have any problem at all. The CPU cores are not heavily under load at all and peek around 18%.

 

With common 720p flash videos, the APU peeks around 27% but nothing to worry about.

 

Normal .avis or other low resulution stuff no problem at all. Of course we tested with Media Player Classic which supports DXVA and is much more usefull compared to Windows Media Player.