Support NeoGAF

[Redneckerz]

Digital Foundry finally acquired themselves an illustre motherboard with an AMD A9-9820 - A processor that may or may not be a rebranded Xbox One APU (TheThreadsMayBindUs will disagree here)

Rich goes through the works of testing this out - and finds that the integrated graphics is just too unstable. But what occurs when it can be paired with a high end GPU? In what is an utter display of constant astonishment, DF went on a journey.

Cyberpunk 2077 on PC... tested on an Xbox One CPU? Yes, it's possible - just. Last year, a PC motherboard with an embedded Xbox One processor appeared in Far Eastern markets. It's the first time we've been able to run Windows on a last-gen console APU, so just what level of gaming performance can we achieve from it? And if we run Cyberpunk 2077's PC version on a console CPU, how does it actually compare to the console version itself? So began a lengthy journey that only recently reached a conclusion.

What's discussed: (Ballpoints)

• An overview of the motherboard
• Integrated graphics briefly discussed
• How a high end GPU was connected and the bandwidth limitations this introduces
• Vis-a-vis performance comparisons with Xbox One X, primarily Cyberpunk 2077 but also Doom Eternal
• The unique position of this hardware int he PC space

More:
Earlier thread with Anandtech review
Written review with die-shots and gallery at Eurogamer

 

[intbal]

By the time they found out that GDDR5 was not going to be suffering from shortages (an assumption that basically led to the weak design of the Xbox One), it was too late to change the architecture of their APU. But there will still some things Microsoft could have done to make Xbox One more competitive against the PS4. They should've ditched Kinect, supercharged the cooling system, overclocked the CPU to 2Ghz, and lowered the price to match PS4 (Kinect was hideously expensive). It wouldn't have solved their GPU deficit at the beginning of the 8th generation, but it would've given Xbox One a solid advantage in a number of titles that were constantly thrashing the CPU.
The existence of this Chinese Xbox One processor proves that the CPU could easily hit much higher speeds than the settings of PS4/XBO. Yes, the GPU and SRAM aren't functioning in Rich's test, so heat and power levels are different, but 1.6 and 1.75Ghz speeds were extremely conservative for the Jaguar. Microsoft especially wanted (needed) the Xbox One to be as quiet as possible because of Kinect voice commands. So their cooling system is nowhere near as powerful as it could be.

 

[Andodalf]

By the time they found out that GDDR5 was not going to be suffering from shortages (an assumption that basically led to the weak design of the Xbox One), it was too late to change the architecture of their APU. But there will still some things Microsoft could have done to make Xbox One more competitive against the PS4. They should've ditched Kinect, supercharged the cooling system, overclocked the CPU to 2Ghz, and lowered the price to match PS4 (Kinect was hideously expensive). It wouldn't have solved their GPU deficit at the beginning of the 8th generation, but it would've given Xbox One a solid advantage in a number of titles that were constantly thrashing the CPU.
The existence of this Chinese Xbox One processor proves that the CPU could easily hit much higher speeds than the settings of PS4/XBO. Yes, the GPU and SRAM aren't functioning in Rich's test, so heat and power levels are different, but 1.6 and 1.75Ghz speeds were extremely conservative for the Jaguar. Microsoft especially wanted (needed) the Xbox One to be as quiet as possible because of Kinect voice commands. So their cooling system is nowhere near as powerful as it could be.

They did have overkill cooling, not because they needed it to be quite for voice commands, but because they wanted to avoid RROD 2

 

[Bernd Lauert]

 

[intbal]

They did have overkill cooling, not because they needed it to be quite for voice commands, but because they wanted to avoid RROD 2

No.
Overkill would've been running the fan at quadruple speed, ala GeForce FX 5800 Ultra.