# I'm planning on getting a new AMD A10-5800K FM2 APU

## genblood

I'm planning getting some new hardware for my main system. I'm going to get the new

        AMD A10-5800K APU and a new Biostar mother board. I figure I'll get a AMD 7770 graphics 

        card too. I also, plan on 16GB memory and a 256 GB for the OS. I'm going to have 2 other drives

        for data and backups too. 

                  Does anyone have any hardware similar to these specs?

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## wrc1944

AFAIK, the AMD 7000 series still has various issues with linux, even with the latest 3.6.0 kernel, and regardless of whatever hardware it's running on, with both open source, and amd linux drivers.

I'm no expert on this, but I have been thinking of upgrades to my hardware and did some researching.  I could be wrong, but I came to the conclusion that currently I would probably be better using an amd 6000 series card, thus the newer AMD APU's might have more of a problem running with full potential on linux.  It seems there is some driver work being done, but I've yet to find any articles that would convince me running linux on 7000 series cards would be utilizing the full power/features of the new hardware, either with an APU fusion chip, or discrete cpus and gpus. 

Hopefully, this will progress rapidly with new kernels/drivers .  Maybe it's already good enough, and my info is outdated, but again I'm no expert, and would like to have some feedback from more knowledgeable users.   

For now, I've decided to stay with my slightly outdated AM3 AsRock 880gm board, with an amd X6 1090t (recently upgraded to a radeon 6570 2GB card).  I compared this to the top-of-line new A10 APU, and the benchmarks indicated my current rig slightly better in most tests.  My X6 1090t and gcc-4.7.2 certainly can churn through all my Gentoo compiling in short order (pegging all 6 cores at full usage), and I don't game so 3D video isn't that much of an issue for me.

FM2 boards and the new APU's look pretty good, and supposedly the FM2 socket is going to be around for future APU upgrades (great selling point).  However, I'm waiting for the Steamroller desktop cpu upgrades or beyond, and probably would still select discrete cpu and gpu solutions, unless the APU platforms become so compelling performance-wise that it becomes a no-brainer is you consider prices.  I'll even admit APU might become the future of all desktop computing, but I'm not there yet. Steamroller info: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6201/amd-details-its-3rd-gen-steamroller-architecture

Anyone with better more current info on the status of linux and the amd 7000 series cards vs. 6000 series?

EDIT:  Forgot to mention, and it's pretty important.  With any of these APU's, your system ram speed makes a big difference in the graphics performance, and slower ddr3 will cripple the potential native to the chip.  I would always combine any APU with the fastest ram possible on the board I'm using, unless I already had a very good video card that met my needs. For example, what's the point in getting a great new APU if you only will be running ddr3 1066/800 system ram in your FM2 board?

Some user feedback is starting to trickle in: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113280

In a week or two I'll bet we get a much better picture of what to expect from Trinity/FM rigs.  Benchmarks are good (sometimes), but can often mislead due to the nature of how the benchmarks are coded.  I find it very useful to read hands-on reports from actual real-world users with different usage patterns, and especially from those who build their own systems.

FM2/trinity user feedback: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138366   Biostar Hi-Fi A85W FM2 AMD A85X (Hudson D4) HDMI SATA 6Gb budget A85X with Trinity APU, runs ddr3 2133 fine.

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