Strangely, the A6-3500 and HD 6450 combination was slightly slower than the same graphics card paired with the A6-3650, despite them having the same 3D graphics chipset - the A6-3500's lower overall processing power seems to make a difference. With this £26 card fitted you get a large increase in 3D performance we could run Dirt 3 at 1,280x720 with High detail and 4x anti-aliasing enabled and still see a smooth 38.1fps.

For a good value speed boost you could pair the processor with a 512MB AMD Radeon HD 6450 graphics card in Crossfire mode. This is just about playable and impressive for such an inexpensive processor. When running Dirt 3 at 1,280x720 with High detail and no anti-aliasing, we saw 28.5fps, which is the same as the A6-3650 managed. The processor still holds its own in games, though. While a PC with this processor will be fine for office work and web browsing, an overall score of 38 shows this isn't a processor for hugely intensive tasks. Although 53 in our image-editing test isn’t far behind the A6-3650, the smaller number of cores made itself felt in our multithreaded video-encoding and multitasking tests. The processor has a lower TDP than the more powerful Llano chips - 65W instead of 100W, so seems to have some thermal headroom in our lightly-threaded image editing benchmark, the processor stayed at 2.4GHz most of the time. As with Intel's Sandy Bridge processors, Llano cores can boost their speed when they need extra power this usually happens in applications that are mainly using just one core, so the processor can boost up the speed of that core without overheating. It has significantly reduced processing power, though, with only three instead of four cores which run at 2.1GHz rather than 2.6GHz. The A6-3500 has the same graphics technology as the A6-3650, with 320 stream processors running at 443MHz.

Amd vision processor specs