Kaveri's Revenge

I'm just going to start by saying sorry for bringing up painful memories. Kaveri was a painful experience for those of us who paid for it at launch in 2014. The promised land of a low-voltage system that could make 12" laptops game was definitely not delivered at that time.

If you're familiar with my posts and wondering, yes, I pulled another old refurb off the heap to do some hobby testing. Kaveri is back and the short version is I have an A8 from 2014 that is currently running Fortnite at higher settings and framerate than a Nintendo Switch. Before you laugh, a Switch is $300 and this is an HP you can buy right now for $85 refurbished.

Test System: HP Elitebook 725 G2 - A8 PRO-7150B, 12GB 1600MHz DDR3, 128GB SSD.

When these came out, the best you could do was minimize throttling and try to stay at close to the base clock for as long as possible before performance started to degrade. So I thought I would test if they had actually solved anything over the past 5 years with driver and firmware updates. Lo and behold, they did.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that with newest firmware, current drivers and just basic manufacturer tweaks like Overdrive and WattMan, Kaveri actually freaking works like it should in 2019. Now I'm not saying run out and buy one, I still had to disable Turbo core completely and I made sure to repaste the system and clean the heat sink, which takes a bit of time investment on this system (has a milspec sub-frame). Once I did these things to make sure age and factory crappiness wasn't a factor, I actually watched a Kaveri APU play Fortnite for 5 hours straight, holding its stock 1.9GHz clock without fail and never once throttling. At just its normal, nothing overclocked or turbo level of performance, it was able to maintain 720p and low settings at 45-60fps in Fortnite, which I had intended to use to kill it. I seriously almost died of shock. Then I started testing other modern games that scale down well, like Dark Souls Remastered, Katamari Remastered, Path of Exile and more. They all ran perfectly playable at low settings.

So now I'm like "Okay, what if this had actually worked when it came out?" So I tested Arkham Origins, Dark Souls II and Sleeping Dogs. It literally ran the &*%$ out of them. Medium settings at native 1366p, 60fps all day long. Which is all I ever would have wanted from a 12" device at the time.


What is my point and conclusion from all this? Well my first reaction was "#$%* you AMD!" If these parts had just been configured with a passing knowledge of physics when they launched, instead of aiming for marketing lies, we would have all been very happy a very long time ago in laptop years. So I guess my point is never assume these manufacturers are actually smarter than we are. They totally messed this one up and it would have been amazing if AMDs driver people were half as good at tweaking as the community here. Also be glad AMD brought on new people to make chips like Zen actually deliver. We were right, it was broken and it honestly hurts worse now, knowing I could have had a laptop in late 2014 that can still run modern games now.

If you are on a budget though and know how to tweak p-states, go get one asap. This EliteBook is honestly not that ancient seeming and it's actually making my recent 2-in-1 with ULV i5 look like kind of a heap of garbage in the gaming performance department.

 

@ryanlecocq could you please check Overwatch by chance? Particularly 1366x768 all lowest except FOV, and 1920x1080 all lowest except FOV. Also, how about Spectre, Meltdown, etc mitigations, does AMD care for such old CPUs? I am genuinely interested...

 

I actually don't own Overwatch. My understanding from documentation is that AMD's patches should support back to even Llano, so Kaveri definitely should have received the same patch last year. So it's as protected as it can be, which is more than contemporary Intel chips (still widely in use) that are more vulnerable. So short answer is if you trust the fixes, it's at least as safe as a Haswell or Ivy Bridge chip and probably a lot more.

 

@ryanlecocq thank you very much for your answers!

How's trackpoint experience? How does it compare to a Thinkpad (if you used one)?

I assume it would be OK if I purchase it with A10 instead of A8. So far I was unable to find any reasonably priced 725 G2 with FHD IPS Multitouch display, though; HD TN panel question is definitely out of the question. Will keep looking.
.

 

@Starlight5 A Kaveri A8 and A10 will perform identically in most situations, since they will both be capped at about the same performance by temperature. Neither runs at the silly clocks AMD originally promised, so both end up actually running about 1.8-2GHz. As for GPU it's about the same. The r6 has a few more cores, but neither the r5 or r6 mobile radeons actually ever hit their max performance if you are using the CPU cores at all. I actually capped my GPU clock at 500MHz after a while. It has a "boost" to 533MHz, but whenever it tried it just heats up and immediately clocks lower than it was before. So like 1 second at 533MHz, then a minute at 400MHz to cool down. At 500MHz max, it never throttled on games tested.

I wouldn't even bother trying to hunt down a specific configuration of a 5 year old laptop. Support for Kaveri APUs in Overdrive is universal, so even if the manufacturer hasn't patched the firmware to limit the turbo clocks, you can easily turn the turbo off completely like I ended up doing anyway. If for whatever reason Overdrive doesn't work, there are still the unofficial tools people have used before for AMD chips that aren't unlocked on their software. The consumer version of the A8-7150B is actually considered an A10 with the same specs, the A10-7300. That chip is in many, many laptops from 2015, including most HP sizes and trims and the entire Acer R3 and R5 line.

 

@ryanlecocq I expect good keyboard with trackpoint, at least 16GB RAM, FHD or better display with multitouch, ability to be folded to 180 degrees and business class build quality from any laptop I consider purchasing - regardless if it's brand new or 5+ years old. Unlike almost every other AMD-powered business laptop, Elitebook 725 G2 ticks all boxes and delivers better gaming performance than my newer & more expensive Intel-powered laptop; upgrading the display myself, however, is both unpleasant and expensive experience, compared to just throwing in an SSD and new RAM; instead of throwing money at display (and probably LCD cable) upgrade, I might as well grab something like Thinkpad A485 with Ryzen.

 

Since this isn't my primary system, I hadn't tested most of the things you are asking about. I got around to it today though while doing tech projects. Mine does unfortunately have the 1366x768 TN panel, so I can't test the one you want. I have used a system with that exact panel before though and it's... okay. It still only has slightly better brightness and still trends blue like the TN panel.

Keyboard: The keyboard is absolutely fabulous. It's an EliteBook. If Lenovo didn't have better almost everything else, I would buy all high-end HPs for these keyboards. It's far and away better than the current MacBooks, though that isn't saying much. Deep travel compared to anything else in the size range.
Trackpoint: I honestly have no idea what good is with these things. I try to never use the nub or the trackpad on systems like this. It feels... fine? Responsive as far as I can tell.
Foldability: Not at all. The non 2-in-1 EliteBooks only fold to 165 degrees, so not even close to what you want. You would have to buy the 2-in-1, which is Intel ULV only in that series.
Build Quality: TBF, I love cars, so of course I love EliteBooks, but I love EliteBooks. It's made of magnesium body panels on a steel frame. So it's basically like a car. It makes them a bit heavier and thicker than competitors, but they are unholy tough. Also it means it's a long process to disassemble and repaste, which I generally do with every laptop I use personally.

If you can afford a Ryzen system that ticks all of your boxes, you should do that instead. Kaveri is surprisingly good now (in the cheap refurbished market) that it's had a few fixes, but even a mobile R3 can destroy it in all cases. Also when HP runs sales, you can get a current gen system with Ryzen for a very decent price. You might be able to get HP's keyboard at the same price as an A485. Not like Lenovo's KB is bad though, both are great laptops. If any Kaveri system you are looking at is over $150, even with all those features, don't bother. It's too old and not worth it. I bought this one because it was a really good deal at the time for what it was.

 

@ryanlecocq I read your evaluation about A8 Kaveris performance with interest and was really suprised by introduced performance.
Please could you be more specific about details of your setup?
- used drivers: you used last AMD drivers or a little older HP drivers?
- other used drivers were Windows 10 generic?
- how you capped your CPU and GPU clock (with AMD overdrive tool?)
- any other tools/drivers/BIOS setup were used or should be mentioned?

I dont play games a lot but 45-60fps in Fortnite seems hard to belive for me. (there are a lot of reviews on youtube with half fps)

 

Thanks, this is great!

I'm confused, actually. Is your point that Kaveri was hamstrung by bad drivers from AMD, and now AMD has fixed that problem so Kaveri is actually functioning properly as it should have been?

Or is your point that because of the Switch and modern PC games for the masses like Fortnite being able to scale really well, it so happens that Kavari is now ok as a budget APU?

I'm really confused and not sure what the over arching point here is.

 

I just briefly checked eBay most of the Elitebook 725s are between $200-300 depending on configuration and condition. The price isn't enticing enough, unless you really want a 12" laptop.

If you're spending between $200-300 I think the better choice for gaming is an Intel CPU with discrete 700/800 series GPU.

 

@NB_Neenja Definitely the former. The refurbisher I got mine from was selling them for under $100, which is reasonable for a 5 year old laptop. So for that you could say it’s a good option, but I’m definitely here for the “what went wrong” experiment, not trying to build good $100 laptops.

$2-300 is just stupid if we’re talking about this configuration. One that shipped with the 1080p screen, 16gb ram and at least the 256ssd is maybe worth $250. It’s a 5 year old laptop that isn’t a MacBook. Anyone selling this for that is delusional.

Actually, just because I don’t have time to respond to necro posts for years, I’ll just be super clear. All of my projects are for curiosity and practice troubleshooting. I am an experienced tech doing this stuff for kicks on the weekend and I don’t have to pay for most of the parts. If you are just poor and want a computer that punches above its weight, PLEASE follow the advice of others instead, in threads dedicated to the best cheap systems.