AMD Trinity Buyer's Guide

While AMD's second generation "Trinity" APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) have been available in pre-built desktops and laptops for many months now, the chips and accompanying motherboards themselves have only been available in retail channels for DIY desktop builders for a few weeks. Trinity is based on AMD's newest "Piledriver" CPU and "Cayman" GPU architectures and uses socket FM2. Like its Llano APU predecessor, the Trinity APU offers respectable CPU performance and discrete-level GPU performance on the same die, all with low power consumption. While APUs have been very popular in laptops, we outline in this guide how Trinity can be pressed into service on the desktop. Read on for our recommended general home/office usage, HTPC, and budget gaming system builds.