Crossfire with a Kaveri looks worthwhile, a cheap way to get some vastly improved performance.

“the GPUs aren't powerful enough to take advantage of the CPU-freeing attributes of Mantle”. This is not strictly true as in heavy action scenes the CPU may very well become the bottleneck even with low-end GPUs and this would have a more noticeable impact on the minimum frame rate. Including minimum fps would give a clearer indication of the affect Mantle has and I'd expect to see a more significant increase in the min fps than the avg by decreasing CPU load. The min fps may only occur for a split sec so may not impact avg fps figures much at all. A significant increase in min fps often has a very noticeable impact on game-play though as you don't want things getting choppy during the really heavy action. So saying Mantle “doesn't show any meaningful benefits over Direct3D” may be true if you evaluate it only with avg fps, but please give us the full picture and include min fps and draw your conclusions then.

Could you run tests on 250x GDDR5 ? and see how this one works out ?

If only you told the truth instead of this nonsense. see this dudes, http://wccftech.com/amd-kaveri-dual-graphics-benchmarked-frame-pacing-fix/ . The fix is over 100% in performance. kinda kills a i5 what ever with GPU.
Yes a frame pacing fix. AMD drivers to bring your dual gpu up to speed.
One other item, Mantle is battlefield 4 specific at this time is it not, i'll let you check that out, but i thought there were
about 6 game developers working with it at present, if you watch AMD's youtube video that was released about a month back. correct me if i'm wrong.

QUOTE=bert7;3199073]see this dudes, http://wccftech.com/amd-kaveri-dual-graphics-benchmarked-frame-pacing-fix/ . The fix is over 100% in performance.

good link that

An A10 850K is around £130, add in this card and thats £190. An i5 4440 plus this card is around the same price, which is the better combination if you take gaming out of the equation?

If you take gaming out of the equation you don't need a dedicated graphics card.
Also if you don't want a dual graphics setup you can go with FX 8320 and a decent after market cooler instead of i5 4440. IMHO these new apus are too expensive. Yes you have more gpu processors but the memory bandwidth is a huge bottleneck and I don't see the reason why they did that.

Interesting to see the dual graphics make sure a difference in this setup. Doesn't make any difference in my new laptop (link). Might be down to the single channel RAM but I was getting lower benchmarks with it on… Hoping a second stick of RAM and new drivers (as mentioned above) might make a difference….

APU and hybrid crossfire looks like a pretty sweet deal to me, though you are completely at the mercy of games programmers as not all games play nice with crossfire, let alone be coded for mantle. I think a safer bet is still an intel cpu and a discrete gpu if you're building a desktop with the intent to game. Would be the obvious choice for laptops though IMO.

MustardCutter
APU and hybrid crossfire looks like a pretty sweet deal to me, though you are completely at the mercy of games programmers as not all games play nice with crossfire, let alone be coded for mantle. I think a safer bet is still an intel cpu and a discrete gpu if you're building a desktop with the intent to game. Would be the obvious choice for laptops though IMO.

Depends on the game you want to play. For anything multithreaded unless you go for i7s a 6 core FX6300 or an 8 core FX8350 may be the better deal. Still favour discreet GPU too, but these APUs do make it feasible to game on moderate settings without needing a second card, or if you want to go a bit further without too much expense to pair them up with a budget GPU. It's really good news for simple low-spec builds.

ik9000
Depends on the game you want to play. For anything multithreaded unless you go for i7s a 6 core FX6300 or an 8 core FX8350 may be the better deal.

Yeah but with that you're at the mercy of programmers again with how threaded they make their game. An i5 quad should have enough single core performance to beat the AMD with more, but weaker cores in most gaming scenarios as well as general use computing. Plus AM3+ is a dead socket AFAIK.