AMD AM1 Platform and Athlon 5350 with GTX 750 Ti - 1080p at under $450
750Full article: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/General-Tech/AMD-AM1-Platform-and-Athlon-5350-GTX-750-Ti-1080p-under-450
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After Josh's initial review of the AMD AM1 Platform and the Athlon 5350, we received a few requests to look at gaming performance with a discrete GPU installed. Even though this platform isn't being aimed at gamers looking to play demanding titles, we started to investigate this setup anyway.
While Josh liked the ASUS AM1I-A Mini ITX motherboard he used in his review, with only a x1 PCI-E slot it would be less than ideal for this situation.
Luckily we had the Gigabyte AM1M-S2H Micro ATX motherboard, which features a full length PCI-E x16 slot, as well as 2 x1 slots.
Don't be mistaken by the shape of the slot though, the AM1 chipset still only offers 4 lanes of PCI-Express 2.0. This, of course, means that the graphics card will not be running at full bandwidth. However, having the physical x16 slot makes it a lot easier to physically connect a discrete GPU, without having to worry about those ribbon cables that miners use.
The Gigabyte board will be paired with the same APU that Josh tested, the Athlon 5350. At just under $70, he found this processor to be a quite impressive performing option. Also important is to keep in mind that the TDP of this part is just 25W, making heat and noise virtually unnoticable.
Now that we had the motherboard and the processor picked out, we needed to pick the discrete GPU to pair them with. Since we are going on a power efficiency kick here with a 25W CPU, we decided to go with one of the most power efficient GPUs ever, the NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti.