Review: AMD Athlon 5350 (28nm Kabini)

Conclusion

AMD's decision to offer the Kabini APU in desktop socketed form is a wise one. Four Jaguar CPU cores are more than capable of handling everyday applications used by millions of people - indeed, they're pound-for-pound better than the Steamroller cores found in the mainstream Kaveri APUs. The Radeon graphics core, meanwhile, provides a flexible array of outputs and, while not a true gaming-grade GPU by any stretch of the imagination, is strong in multimedia video playback.

Put the two together, include all the necessary I/O on the silicon, and you have a capable little system-on-chip processor that's suited for a wide range of environments, from powering media centre PCs to large-scale office deployment.

The real boon is the price, as these APUs and supporting AM1 motherboards start at £25 a pop, rising to £40 for the premium models. Evaluated in context of the price and market positioning, there really is not a lot to dislike. Sure, the Radeon graphics architecture is stunted, single-channel memory does it no favours and it's never going to blitz the benchmarks, but that's patently not the intended purpose.

We'd encourage AMD and its motherboard partners to bring socketed Kabini to form factors not much bigger than the Intel NUC. A small PC, helped along by an inexpensive mSATA or M.2 SSD, would tick many of the boxes we'd like for a low-cost second computer.

The Good

Great value for money
Cheap supporting motherboards
Decent everyday performance
Good as a HTPC or second machine

The Bad

Graphics core rather stunted

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AMD Athlon 5350

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The AMD Athlon 5350 CPU is available to purchase from Scan Computers*.

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