AMD A-Series Bristol Ridge A6-9500 BOX (AD9500AGABBOX)

All inclusive

AMD A6-9500 is the cheapest model in the new Bristol Ridge processor family. Unlike Ryzen processors, also made for socket AM4, it has a built-in graphics accelerator, which eliminates the need for a separate graphics card.

Design features

At its disposal, the A6-9500 received two twin cores of the Excavator architecture (the same was used in the older chips of the previous generation Kaveri Refresh) with a common cache and a floating point unit (FPU). In addition, the volume of the L2 cache was reduced from 2 to 1 MB — the simplification is not critical, but still annoying, reducing the performance of an already not the fastest processor (one and a half times slower than Ryzen Zen).

Business — time, fun — hour

But the integrated graphics of the A6-9500 is very good — Radeon R5 with 384 GCN microcores. As a result, this chip allows you to play at FullHD-resolution and low graphics settings or at HD and medium in Dota 2, CS:GO, WoT, Skyrim and other moderately demanding hits.

Cheap and cheerful

Given the low cost (only $50), AMD A6-9500 can become a good basis for both office PCs and home theaters, which simultaneously acts as a simple game console. Moreover, the chip received an updated VCE hardware video decoder with support for the latest x265 (HEVC) and VP9 codecs (the latter is used by default on YouTube). But we do not recommend buying an energy-efficient (35 instead of 65 W) version of this processor (A6-9500E): a frequency cut by half a gigahertz can be forgiven, but graphics that have shrunk to 256 microcores are not.