High end APU as a regular CPU

[VMaxMuffin]

Hi everyone,

I'm just starting to select parts with a friend to build him a new PC. Within his current budget, we might be able to squeeze an i5 and R9 280, possibly a 285 or GTX 960 (depending on other factors and exact costs). However, in about a month he will be getting some more money to spend on further upgrades. I was wondering about starting him off on an APU (one of the A10s probably) and then using that just as a regular quad core CPU with a more powerful GPU (290, 970, possibly 980).

Basically I just want to know if there's any significant disadvantage to this - particularly if it were to be a major bottleneck. I'm struggling to find A10 benchmarks against CPUs like the i5 4460 or 4690k when they're both paired with a high end GPU.

Thanks for your help.

[Godlygamer23]

High end APUs will bottleneck high end video cards using DX11.

[i_build_nanosuits]

those apu's are all very slow and weak and they will greatly bottleneck gpu better than r9 270 in most games...cpu wise they are the same as the athlon 760k and 860k which are very low end parts that wont even compare to a low end i3 in terms of perormance...sry.

[Briggsy]

When the gtx680 and HD7970 were the strongest graphic cards on the market, AMD's architecture was good enough for gaming. Pair anything better than a gtx 770 (rebranded 680) or R9 280x (rebranded 7970) with a top end AMD cpu, and the cpu won't be pushing enough draw calls per clock to the graphic card to fully utilize the graphic horse power (dx11 bottleneck).

 

avoid pentiums for gaming. i3 or i5 is bare minimum if you want to use a 290/x/780/ti/970/980. If you want to SLI/CrossfireX then i7 or hyper-threaded E3 xeon.

[VMaxMuffin]

Thanks for your input everyone, I'll stick with the i5.