Better APU or buy a Video Card for Facebook Games?

[ir_cow]

Hello!

 

I'm looking for some advice on a subject I have little to no experience with. Facebook games.

 

The problem is right now some Facebook games lag on the inlaws computer and they don't care about the details, they just want it to run smoothly.

 

So the current setup I have for them is F2 A8-5800k , 120gb SSD and 8gb of 1866 ddr3 running windows 7.

 

So the question is, should I upgrade them to the A10-6800k ($100) which is terminal for that socketo and Motherboard I'm using.. or buy a entry level video card.

 

I'm not sure if Facebook games use the video card or cpu these days.

[El_Capitan]

I think most Facebook games are Flash-based games, but I could be wrong. Are you there to monitor the CPU and APU usage while they're playing on it? My guess is that it's pegging their CPU and memory, since they're also probably playing the game on a browser.

[ir_cow]

Yeah they are playing in the browser. I'll have to look and see what's getting pegged.

[cchalogamer]

Yeah I've got a fair number of customers playing the "hardcore" of FB games on Haswell Pentiums without issues so I'm guessing it's more of a CPU load than GPU. Of course monitoring it's the way to be sure.

[dr_bowtie]

If it's lagging I;d say you got issues somewhere. I have a A8-5600k running stock and it plays flash games fine with no lag.

 

The E-350 will play them but with lag but anything better like the A-series plays them fine.

 

AM1 isnt that good either.

 

EDIT: how much ram is in the box and how much is allocated to graphics? I am using 8gb with 1gb allocated.

[SpikeSoprano]

My wife used to play a lot of FB games with an old pent dual core with onboard video with no problems, but you do need a fairly fast isp provider. When she did have problems it was usually with the site itself, a lot of people play games on their site and their servers couldn't handle the load. Also now with some sites moving away from flash for security reasons that might be adding to their problems. Even now that I upgraded her pc and put my old gtx 460 in it , she still will get lag on some of the games and I know it's not hardware related.

One more thing, a lot of people started using firefox instead of IE and that seemed to solve their lagging problems.

Edited December 26, 2015 by SpikeSoprano

[ir_cow]

If it's lagging I;d say you got issues somewhere. I have a A8-5600k running stock and it plays flash games fine with no lag.

 

The E-350 will play them but with lag but anything better like the A-series plays them fine.

 

AM1 isnt that good either.

 

EDIT: how much ram is in the box and how much is allocated to graphics? I am using 8gb with 1gb allocated.

 

I didn't know you could set how much memory the GPU got. I figured it was like 256mb. I'll have to get into the settings and look.

 

They use Firefox too. It's more like high shuddering than lag. It will speed up and slow down depending on whats on the screen...so frame rate would describe it best.

[dr_bowtie]

yes you can. It should be under Chipset settings by the Primary Graphics.

 

ASRock boards I've used let you allocate up to 2gb to graphics. I never go less than 512mb.

[ir_cow]

So I looked into it and found most of the games only use 2 cores up to 70% while a few use all 4 @ 30-40%. For the life of me I cannot find those graphic settings, but i'll look again. It seems 768mb is dedicated by default.

 

Using a Asus F2A85-V Pro Motherboard.

 

Edit: Nvm found it. Its called UMA Frame Buffer Size. Never would have guessed if I didn't look it up.

[dr_bowtie]

upping it should help.

 

I just swapped my daily driver that had a ASRock QC-5000-itx/PH embedded APU to a ASRock AM1H-itx and AMD AM1-5350 with 8gb ram and 1gb allocated and it seems to do flash games in facebook fine in Chrome. No lag I can tell.