What Is An APU? PC gaming is traditionally expensive compared to console gaming; however, with PC builders like CyberPower, you can build your own system for less than it costs to buy one pre-built. Unfortunately, bad luck with Covid19 and a lack of gamers has to lead to an increase in prices of the required components for a good PC.
The high cost of GPUs means that many consumers are looking for other devices to power their rigs. This has contributed to the renewed interest in CPUs for this application. One such alternative is APU. This article will talk about what this is and why they’re popular among budget PC gamers.
The first thing you need for a good gaming PC is a good CPU. As many of us can’t get our hands on one, the next best choice is an APU. It’s like a CPU but is pricier than one. We’ll cover that later. To start, let’s understand what an APU is.
What is an APU?
APU or an Accelerated Processing Unit is a processor that acts as a CPU (Central Processing Unit) and a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). APUs are processors with integrated graphics, combining a CPU and a GPU together. Essentially, they offer the best of both worlds in one unit.
This piece of hardware is great if you’re building your first gaming PC on a shoestring budget. A PC built with an APU instead of a CPU will avoid the need for a bulky graphics card.
These pieces of hardware are designed for devices with compact designs. Even without a dedicated GPU, consoles use an APU in order to save on space. The name APU stands for Accelerated Processing Unit. You’ll see it in-game consoles like Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One.
Meanwhile, APU refers to AMD’s 64-bit processor series, which come with VGA graphics. However, if you also need a CPU with graphics for multimedia purposes, Intel has CPUs that include a dedicated graphics card. The name may sound similar, but AMD’s Accelerated Processing Unit (or APU) is copyrighted. These processors usually have better-integrated graphics than Intel CPUs.
Should You Buy An APU?
Getting an APU is great in the sense that it allows you to use one processor for both physics, artificial intelligence, rendering, and video playback. But before you do anything else, think about the advantages of getting a CPU + GPU combo. There are positives and negatives about the CPU-GPU.
The positives are that they’re high performance and low power, but the negatives are that it’s much more costly than other options out there. For example, an APU (processor) can be higher than a processor with the same specs. However, you have to take into account the cost of the GPU in that equation too- when accounting for that, APUs seem like the better deal.
If you’re planning to upgrade your computer hardware in the future, we recommend that you buy a processor and graphics card separately. You can’t upgrade an APU with a graphics card (if you currently have one) because it does not support that hardware. And while there are many Advanced Processing Units (APUs) in the market by AMD, and each in its league, they won’t surpass the traditional Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), at least not for now.
Surely, they do outperform Intel CPUs with integrated graphics; however, to outperform a CPU + GPU combo, it’s still far behind while AMD APUs are great, they’ll never perform as well as the traditional dedicated GPU – arguably not for many, many years. Still, they do outperform Intel CPUs with integrated graphics. So if that’s your goal then an APU might be the right choice.
Conclusion
An APU is a great new technology that allows you to get the most out of your computer. It combines a CPU and a GPU into a single chip, making it possible to get great performance while keeping the size of your computer small. We hope you enjoyed our article on the APU, and if you have any questions, please let us know your thoughts about this technology in the comments below.
