 AMD's new Kaveri architecture APUs feature not only a quad core CPU on board, but 47% of the die area is actually taken up by a seriously powerful DirectX 11 graphics processor that uses a scaled down version of the same GCN architecture that you'll find on their desktop Radeon series graphics cards. Now you might be asking yourself, why does it matter that I have a powerful graphics processor on my CPU? Why do I need an APU? To which I would reply, in this case HSA or heterogeneous system architecture. This is, in a nutshell, the ability of the processor to treat both its CPU cores and integrated graphics processing cores as equals that can work together rather than two separate things that basically work independently and communicate with each other over the relatively slow PCI express bus. Now with HSA, those two processors can even access the same system memory in order to achieve perfect collaboration. And while we'll need software to play catch up a little bit before the majority of your programs are optimized for HSA, the performance benefits that can be realized are very significant. And with all of that in mind, it is time for a build guide featuring this exciting processor that marks the first availability of HSA hardware. So let's start off our rationale with the APU. Just as a reminder, an APU contains both a CPU component and a GPU component. So we'll start with the CPU part. With its steamroller cores, Kaveri doesn't dramatically improve raw CPU performance over AMD's last generation Richland products. But what it does do is it delivers much lower power consumption without losing any performance. And while adding some very important technologies that establish AMD's leadership position in HSA hardware. I mean, I guess when you're the first one to actually deliver something to the market, that sets you up pretty well for that leader title. Moving on to the GPU, the onboard graphics. This is not your grandpa's onboard graphics. Though, I mean, I mean, well, if your grandpa had onboard graphics, then maybe there was something pretty special actually, since your grandpa's obviously the doctor. But seriously, the GCN architecture of Kaveri's integrated GPU means that you get access to some serious performance and features. Aside from DirectX 11, which I mentioned already, is AMD's Mantle API that actually allows game developers to better optimize their games to make the most of the CPU power they have available. With a well optimized game, we can expect to unlock some serious performance improvements over DirectX 11 with Mantle. Stay tuned for the benchmark section. Next up is AMD's TrueAudio DSP or Digital Sound Processor. A piece of technology that could revolutionize the way in-game audio is handled by game engines in the long term. In games, rather than relying on cheap software tricks to achieve echoes and other spatial effects, TrueAudio allows sound to bounce realistically off of objects accurately according to the player's surroundings. And outside of games, the applications of this technology include things like cleaning background noise out of voice recordings and much, much more. And all of this is without using up valuable CPU cycles. Then finally, there's dual graphics or the ability to basically run your onboard graphics in crossfire with a supported desktop graphics card for tangible performance improvements. We'll be showing you this one running in tandem with an R7250 later on in the video. Which leads us to memory. In AMD's internal testing, they found that 8 gigs is the sweet spot where most people, unless you're doing content creation or some other kind of serious usage, are not using more than that. And I will agree with that up front, but they also found that in addition to dual channel DDR3 1600 MHz, they are finding a benefit all the way up to 2400 MHz dual channel DDR3 memory. So I went with Gskills Ares to 2400 MHz 2x4 gig kit for this particular build, not because I necessarily believe them right off the bat, but because I want to take this system when we're done and do a little bit of validation and find out if it's worth the extra couple bucks. As for why we went with Gskill RAM on our test benches, we found that it just plain works across a very wide variety of motherboards to an extent that we don't see from any other manufacturers. So I've never actually showcased them on the channel before. I figured we might as well do that because it's something that we do use internally and having RAM that just plain operates as intended is pretty invaluable. For the motherboard, we went with an ASRock FM2 A88 X Extreme 6 Plus. And honestly, there's not much of a rationale here. I wasn't particularly picky about the motherboard for this build. The most important thing was to make sure I was getting one that is FM2 Plus as opposed to FM2. FM2 Plus CPUs are not backwards compatible with FM2 boards, whereas FM2 Plus boards will work just fine with FM2 CPUs. So make sure that your retailer has FM2 versus FM2 Plus boards clearly marked, and if you're not sure, double check the manufacturer's website. Now there's a wide variety available from all the usual subspecs, and you'll find fancy features on some of the boards versus other ones, but FM2 Plus boards will have at least the following features in common. Number one, trim support on SSDs running in RAID 0. That's a nice little performance feature right there. Number two is support for DDR3 up to 2400 MHz operating in dual channel mode, although overclocking might get you a little bit more. This particular one supports up to 2600 MHz with overclocking. Number three is support for up to four displays off the onboard graphics on that Kaveri APU that you've got, and number four, again powered by the onboard graphics, is support for 4K video output. For cooling, we went with the Cooler Master Hyper T4, which is actually AMD optimized out of the box, which is kind of unusual these days. There were no awkward adapters or anything like that, and it's got a nice large fan all at a very aggressive price. We could use the box CPU cooler, but this one will give us some cooling headroom for the overclocking tests later on, and it's going to run quieter as a whole. Now storage is always so personal. Normally I say, get a WD Blue or a Kingston V300, but I actually have to leave off my traditional V300 recommendations since Kingston recently changed the flash that they're using on that drive. So, Crucial's M500 series and Samsung's 840 EVO series are both fantastic value oriented options as a replacement for my usual V300 recommendation. I think most people in this price range will choose the capacity of a hard drive over the speed of an SSD when it comes to storage, but another alternative is always grabbing an SSD now and kind of living with the small storage for a while, then adding a hard drive for bulk storage later. It's all just going to depend on your budget and your upgrade schedule. Now the graphics card is a very optional part of this build and something that I would consider more like an upgrade later because we were going for a very value optimized system when we put together the initial list, but this R7 250 is capable of running in dual graphics mode with the onboard GPU, so that's effectively like crossfire between your dedicated and your integrated graphics, and we will show you what you can achieve by doing this particular upgrade later on in the future by running some builds. Our case is the Source 210 Elite from NZXT. It doesn't have many frills, but it looks pretty nice and it acts as a solid enclosure. For our power supply, we've gone with a Seasonic SS400ET, which in my mind is pretty much the only power supply that matters for the entry level. I mean, okay, it comes in a couple of different wattages, but it's all basically the same thing. They're quiet, they have 80 plus bronze certification, and Seasonic as a manufacturer has a fantastic reputation, not to mention they're very inexpensive. For our OS, we're going with Windows 8 because Windows 8. So now it's time for the actual building. First step is to start with a safe, static free workstation and an anti-static strap. I like to keep mine on my ankle so that it stays out of my way while I'm trying to work. All we really need for assembly of a modern computer is a multi-bit screwdriver. I like to use a magnetic one because it doesn't do any damage to the components, and if you drop a screw somewhere or whatever else, it allows you to dig it out of there without being more difficult than it has to be. Now, I always recommend putting the system together once outside of the case to ensure that everything works while it's nice and easy to get at. The motherboard box makes a handy non-conductive test bench. Don't use the anti-static bag that's in the motherboard on top of it though. Once you power on the board, some of these bags have conductive outer coatings and can actually short out your motherboard. So we'll start with CPU installation. Carefully remove both the CPU and the stock heatsink from the box. The pins on the CPU are very, very fragile, so be extremely careful, especially with those. Next, lift up the retention arm on your motherboard, align the triangle on the corner of the CPU with the triangle on the corner of the socket, place the CPU into the socket, don't push on it, and then push down the retention arm. That's pretty much it. Grab the thermal compound that is included with your Hyper T4 cooler. If you were using the stock heatsink, you could just use the thermal compound that is pre-applied to that, then put a line down the middle of the heat spreader. It's a bit bigger for AMD CPUs than it is for their competitor CPUs because their heat spreaders are a little bit larger. Next up, what you're going to do is grab all the mounting hardware. It comes in a big bag like this from your CPU heatsink box and grab your memory. You'll need both of those for this step. Well, one of them anyway. Your memory goes in now because the Hyper T4 overhangs the memory slots to the point where you won't be able to install memory in all of the slots once you've installed your cooler. So for dual channel operation, consult the manual of your motherboard, but go ahead and install them in what would normally be color-coded slots. But in the case of this particular ASRock board, it's just going to be the ones that are spaced out from each other. Whenever installing DDR3 memory, open up the tabs, align the memory, being careful of the notches, carefully place it in, then once it's positioned correctly, push down firmly on both sides until the notches click back into place on their own. Once that's done, this big bag of hardware that I said you'd need, ha! You don't actually need it. I'm sorry, I lied to you guys. All you need because this cooler mounts natively on AMD is this hold down arm. That's it. So we're going to position our fan so that it is blowing air up towards the top of the case. Then we're going to go ahead and run this through the bottom, position it in the little sort of mini heat sink at the bottom with the slot in the middle, accepting the little notch in the retention bar. Place it onto the CPU, latch on the one side that doesn't have a plastic retention clip, then latch it onto the other side. There we go. And tension it. Boom, just like that. Next up, last step here, is take that lead for the CPU fan, go ahead and tie it into a nice little knot or tuck it away somewhere in a corner, preferably both, and then plug that 4-pin connector into the 4-pin PWM fan connector on the motherboard itself labeled CPU Fan 1. Your CPU, RAM, and heat sink, they're all done. When you take your case out of the box, I recommend taking the packing materials and putting them safely away in the box. That way, if you ever have to ship your system somewhere or otherwise transport it, you're going to know where those packing materials are. And your case box is a great place to put the boxes for your other components like your motherboard and CPU, etc. just in case you have to send any of them back for a warranty exchange at any point. You can store them all in there, put them in the attic or whatever else. So the first step is to open up the side panel. This case uses thumb screws, so you can go ahead and take those out with your fingers. If not, there are of course screw slots in the back for a Phillips head screwdriver, and you can use your screwdriver instead. Take off that left side panel, go ahead, put that in the case box as well. That way it'll stay safe and it won't get knocked over or scratched when you're in the process of building your machine. I recommend doing the same thing with the other side panel. The first step whenever you open up any case is to do a quick sanity check. Have a look. Is the manual there? Good. As long as the manual is there, you can check and find out what other hardware was supposed to be included. Your case should come with all of the hardware that you need to install all of your components inside of it. Installing the I.O. Shield in a modern case is pretty simple. You just go ahead and make sure that you've got the top side up and you'll be able to tell on this one because the PS2 and USB ports are going to be at the top. And this is true of most of them. The audio ports will be at the bottom. Go ahead and position it approximately correctly then press on all four corners until they have all snapped into place and it doesn't come out anymore. Now retail power supplies will come with a bunch of extras like installation screws and some cable management stuff. But even though our power supply is completely OEM, it comes in a little baggy. We have that stuff anyway because it comes with your case. So this one comes with some zip ties as well as the four hex screws we're going to need to install our power supply. So next up we just need to choose our orientation. You can either have the fan up so it's drawing air away from the inside of the system and exhausting it out the back. Or you can have fan side down because in this case there's a ventilation hole down there. So the fan actually keeps its own heat and the heat of the other components completely separate making it its own little thermal zone. And the other advantage of this orientation is that usually the cables come out this side and that puts it closer to the motherboard tray for easier cable management. So we're going to go fan side down. The one thing to watch out for if you have your fan down is that you put your case onto a hard surface such as a hardwood or laminate floor. Because if you put it on a carpet and the feet at the bottom of the case sink in you could be suffocating your power supply and causing it to overheat from lack of airflow. Once it's positioned go ahead and screw in the four screws in the only spots where they go. And you have successfully installed the power supply my friend. And it's already time to mount the motherboard in the case. First things first you're going to want to find your standoffs. NZXT has done something here that I actually haven't seen before and they've got some steel content in their standoffs. Meaning that when you use their little tool which is an adapter from a Phillips head screwdriver to a socket for your standoffs you don't actually lose the magnetic effect of your screwdriver. So normally cases include brass standoffs so the adapter is magnetic but the standoffs themselves fall out when you try to use them. But NZXT doesn't do that. So we're going to install the standoffs in the nine locations required for a standard ATX board here on the back of the motherboard tray. Then to make our lives a little bit easier we're going to lay down our case. Position the motherboard carefully above the standoffs making sure not to scrape it. I recommend holding the motherboard by the heat sink that you've already installed. Slide it back towards the IO shield. And then once you have positioned it carefully above the standoffs go ahead and put in the one middle screw so that it doesn't shift around. Then you can let go and put in the rest of the screws. Hard drive installation. For that you're going to need two of the utility screws that come in the bag full of lots of screws with your case. I mean that's sort of the bulk of them. They use the same threading as a standard case screw but they just have a slightly different head. Then all you do is grab your hard drive. Now okay this is a 500 gig one that was all our props department was able to find but we really do recommend the terabyte one for its better capacity to price ratio. Go ahead and pop one of the tool-less hard drive mounting pieces off of the case by turning it counterclockwise. Slide the hard drive into basically whichever bay you would like. It's best to have it next to somewhere that a fan is mounted if there are any fans in your case but this one doesn't come with any and we haven't invested in any additional fans. So it doesn't really matter. The one thing I would think about is how close the connectors are to the SATA ports on your motherboard as well as how you're going to route your power cable to the back of the drive itself. Go ahead and take your tool-less mounting mechanism. Pop that back into the holes on the drive. Turn it clockwise. Then if you're concerned about the drive going anywhere even though the tool-less mounting mechanism is enough if your power is just going to sit next to your table. I usually recommend throwing a couple screws into the other side just in case. And once you're finished that your hard drive is mounted. So with most of the hardware for the system actually installed at this point we're ready to plug in our front panel connectors. We're going to start with USB 3. The pins are very fragile so don't force it but good news it's keyed on the one side so it only goes in one way. Next up we have our front connectors for the power reset, power LED and drive activity LED. For power and reset the orientation doesn't matter. Just make sure you get the leads on the correct pins. But for the hard drive LED as well as the power LED the positive pin has to correspond to the positive lead. So double check your manual if you're not 100% sure. For front USB 2 you can plug into any of the three connectors that are labeled front USB 2. And there is one blacked out pin or empty pin that goes into the place where there is an empty block in the connector itself. And you're actually going to see the same thing with the front panel audio where it's not in the same position so you can't accidentally plug those into the wrong ones. But there is one blanked out one so you go ahead and plug that in in the bottom left corner of your board. This motherboard has lots of fan headers so you can go ahead and run those two included fans. The 140mm at the top and the 120mm at the back pretty much wherever you want. Now there are labels on them like power fan or chassis fan or CPU fan but it doesn't really matter. As long as you remember where you've plugged it in or I mean you can always play around with it after the fact. The only time it will ever make a difference what type of fan it is is when you look in the BIOS and you see the labels and you're adjusting the profile for it or whatever else. So go ahead and plug those in. They're both three pin fans but you can plug them into either a four pin or a three pin connector just like we did. And one little trick that I used is I cut off the Molex connectors that are on these fans by default. These are here just in case you don't have enough spare headers on your motherboard so that you can power the fans directly off the power supply. The advantage of which being you can plug in as many as you want. The disadvantage of which being that you will not be able to control them through your motherboard's UEFI or BIOS in order to turn the fan speeds down and up dynamically when your system is under higher or lower levels of stress. Next up is our main power connectors for the motherboard. So we've got the A-pin which goes in the top corner. Now if I'd been a little bit smarter I might have pre-cable managed this one before I put the motherboard into the case but have no fear there is a cable management hole up at the top of the case that allows us to run that wire up the back. There are also cable management loops back here so we can strap it down and make sure it's nice and tight so we're not going to have any difficulty closing that side panel. Then bring the connector up through the front and plug it into the A-pin spot above the CPU socket. For the 24-pin it's actually even simpler so we're going to run that through the cable management hole down at the bottom of the case. And then it's going to go a very short distance also using the cable management loops at the back of the case to hold it securely in place and then plug into the 24-pin connector along the right hand edge of the motherboard. Our motherboard is now powered. To plug in the hard drive all we have to do is plug our SATA cable into the motherboard. Any of the SATA ports will do. There's no master slave relationship like there used to be with IDE. Then plug that data cable into the back of the drive and finally a power cable into the back of the drive as well. One thing that I usually like to do is instead of using the last SATA connector in the chain, use the second last one or third last one because that will leave the additional ones free as kind of a courtesy connector for next time you want to install a hard drive so you don't have to reroute another SATA cable. Of our two last steps, one is optional and one is, well I guess it's optional but please tidy up your cables. So first we're going to remove the two PCI brackets that correspond to our top PCI Express 16x slot. Then we are going to position our graphics card above the slot. Plug it in basically just by pushing evenly on it on both sides. Once it is locked into place you can go ahead and put the two screws that you took out to remove those brackets back into the top of the card. And where normally I'd be telling people to find the PCI Express connector on your power supply and plug it in, that's not necessary with the R7 250 because it is entirely powered by the PCI Express slot. Once we're done with that we can go ahead and do any last minute cable management. So you can take that bundle of wires and you can tie them down nice and tight down at the bottom of the case or as another option you can throw them behind the drive cages here. If you want to go for a little bit of a tidier look but maybe impede access to some of the screw holes at the back if you ever wanted to fill this baby up with hard drives. You're also going to want to grab a pair of scissors and cut off any extra nubbins on the end of your zip ties and all that good stuff. And your system is physically complete. Now that the system is mostly set up physically it's time for software setup. So in the BIOS there's only a couple of things we're going to have to do. Double check and make sure AHCI is enabled for your SATA ports and ensure that all your components are detected. Then dial in that 2400 megahertz memory to the correct speed. If you're ever not 100% sure about the timings, the voltage and the frequency you can find that either on the manufacturer website or actually usually on the modules themselves. Just make sure you power down your system before you go yanking your memory modules out of it to read the side of them or anything like that. Next up is Windows installation which is super simple if you know how. Don't worry about the lack of a disk drive in this machine. We can grab all that stuff off a disk on another system, copy it to a USB drive, then boot from that. It's faster and more convenient. We've actually done a guide on this before so go ahead and check out the video annotation link here if you want to check that out. In a simple system like this there's only one drive. So installing Windows on the default drive is just the way to go. It'll come completely unformatted and by default it'll fill your entire drive with your Windows installation and then all the spare area you need in order to install all your applications and all that good stuff. Your system will automatically reboot a couple of times and you'll be dumped at the desktop. Now drivers are something that many people struggle with but it's not too overwhelming if you break it down. Install the drivers off of the disk for things like your network because you're obviously not going to be able to get on the internet unless you have a network driver. Then go to the manufacturer website for things like your video card which is AMD whether you put in the discrete graphics or you're running the onboard graphics as well as your motherboard which is ASRock. And just grab all of the stuff for your particular component and install it. If there's anything missing don't worry too much about it because all you have to do is use this little simple trick. Go to device manager, right click the component in question. Usually it'll have a little exclamation mark with a yellow triangle around it. Then go to details. Use the drop down box to go to hardware ID, Google the VIN underscore number number number and dev underscore number number number string and it will tell you exactly what that thing happens to be and then you're golden. Now it's time to test our system. Now I promised a couple of benchmarks showing some of the benefits of HSA and now's the time. Corel Aftershock Pro was run side by side on just the CPU and with HSA enabled to take advantage of our entire APU. And then we followed up with a couple runs of PCMark 8. Huge thanks to FutureMark by the way for providing us with a professional copy which is also HSA aware and demonstrates a very significant increase in overall system performance especially in the work and creation suites. Our first graphics test takes advantage of the Mantle API. The Star Swarm benchmark which we've run in both DirectX mode and Mantle mode to see what kind of performance improvements we can get with an APU seems to validate that Mantle is going to have some wings to fly on in the future even though right now there aren't a ton of games that support it. To validate the operation of dual graphics we've run Bioshock Infinite and Far Cry 3 with just the integrated GPU, just the R7250 utilizing only the CPU part of our APU and then finally with the APU running in dual graphics with the GPU to show you guys that there is a tangible performance improvement. Now there is still a strong argument for more powerful discrete graphics but as a proof of concept dual graphics looks like a promising technology for the future especially on notebooks where the discrete graphics card can be turned off entirely when it's not needed to save power. Other than that something like an R7260X is the kind of upgrade that I would look for for a system like this. To take a look at the performance improvements that we can gain from increasing our memory frequency our G.Skill kit is clocked at 2400 MHz by default but we tried underclocking it to 2133, 1866 and 1600 MHz to see what you get for the extra couple of bucks. Looks pretty worthwhile to give that onboard graphics some extra memory bandwidth when you're gaming, hey? For our last performance test we take our Star Swarm benchmark and then run it at stock speed and then with the CPU and the GPU on our APU both substantially overclocked. Looks like there's some fun to be had for tuners and tweakers who want to try to squeeze the most out of this value oriented onboard solution. I hope you guys enjoyed this video and learned a little something about HSA and the kinds of performance leaps it will enable in the future along with the other AMD technologies showcased in this build guide. One that I actually didn't mention before is 4K media playback. HSA accelerated media players will allow your GPU to handle 4K video playback without taxing your CPU over much and remember both of those things are part of the APU. This is the kind of future proofness that isn't necessarily about some greasy car salesman telling you that you'll be playing the latest games at 4K in five years if you buy this one. Because that kind of future proofness really doesn't exist. Rather it's about making sure that the system maintains its base functionality over a nice long period of time by unlocking additional performance with improved software over the time that you own your system. It's the sort of thing that we're already used to seeing with gaming consoles for example but now with a PC. So that's what we built today. Maybe the exact parts list isn't what you're going to buy but it's a great starting point for a system that's good today and great tomorrow. Thanks for watching this build guide, thanks to AMD for making it possible and just in case you aren't already don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more great computer videos, build guides, unboxings, reviews and all kinds of crazy stuff just like this one. Thanks for watching this build guide, thanks to AMD for making it possible and just in case you aren't already don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more great computer videos, build guides, unboxings, reviews and all kinds of crazy stuff just like this one. Thanks for watching this build guide, thanks to AMD for making it possible and just in case you aren't already don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more great computer videos, build guides, unboxings, reviews and all kinds of crazy stuff just like this one.