AMD "Project Cardinal" 4700S Mini-ITX Bundle Tested

A few months back I was lucky enough to be sent a beta sample of the AMD "Project Cardinal" 4700S CPU and GPU bundle. "Great", I thought, it's just some low end product!

I must admit I was not overly excited about it having spent most of my adult life spoiled with selections of products from the top end of the CPU stack. I was easily excited about multi-core Xeons, i9 Extreme Editions, EPYCs and Threadrippers. Even the NUC made me happy, with its pint sized package, but this sounded like it would be very run of the mill.

I was pleasantly surprised, and even slightly confused when it turned up.

"Where are the DIMM slots" was my first thought.

It was at that point, I realised this was something special. Something out with the norm. So I quickly went ahead and put it into a system for some testing, whilst doing some initial research online. Nothing....hmm. I would have to find out for myself. Time to build.

Building a project Cardinal PC was the easiest build I have done in years. I pulled out an old ATX case (whilst the board is mini-ITX, I never had anything suitably small laying around to encase it with), threw in the CPU/Board/Memory combo with 4 screws. Inserted the bundled Radeon 550 and attached a SATA SSD and PSU. Overall the build took less than 30 mins even with my anal cabling arrangements. A production line could probably do it in 10 or even less.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic Scores Exceed the 8C Intel 9700K gaming CPU - Significantly.

Windows installed from a USB stick without a problem, and then went off and updated 99% of the drivers by itself. No issues, not much for me to do here, except start testing the performance.

AMD 4700S vs PS5 APU

It was at that point I realised just how great a budget focused PC can be. Maybe I had been lost in the higher echelons of the PC market for years, and not appreciated the additional horsepower that was filtering through to the low end!

Sure the CPU is not the top of the line, and it has "only" 8 cores - more than enough for most of us and a great improvement from your 5 year old dual core laptop that takes 3 days to boot up, then becomes unusable when the virus scanner, and 17 plugins you keep paying for launch (delete it, delete it all!)

Once running the system performed really well, I mean really well. After digging around in CPU-Z and SANDRA I discovered the secret to the performance - the system never had any DIMM slots because there was GDDR6 onboard for the CPU!! This was a world first as far as I am aware!

How strange, and clever at the same time. After noticing this I started to do some digging and found that this system was potentially the basis for the PS5, or XBOX One. Nobody is quite sure, but it certainly looks similar to the PS5 CPU, perhaps with the iGPU disabled - which would explain the reasoning for bundling the Radeon 550.

In my tests the 4700S was producing memory bandwidth benchmarks similar to quad and octo channel systems! In fact, this system could hold its own from a CPU perspective with almost any similar TDP based 8 Core CPU. Sure it was not the latest Zen 3 architecture, but the IPC was still good and the user experience was a snappy, performant system that could do any day-to-day task with ease. Even 4K video on YouTube seemed to work well, and that is something that many low end PCs struggle with.

I loaded up 3DMark to do some benchmarks and whilst the performance was not amazing, it was well within spec for the GPU that we were running. Whilst it was slightly constrained (and would be from an upgrade perspective) by a PCIE 4x connection to the GPU, it was within 10% of other Radeon 550 results. A quick overclock on the GPU brought that back into line tout suite. I imagine for 99% of users, you would not even know it was not running the GPU on a true x16. Mining bitcoins for years, and maxxing out the GPUs on 1x connections really proved to me the bottleneck was rarely PCIe anyway.

OK so it is never going to crush AAA gaming titles, and yes, 3DMark Time-spy was almost unusable scoring just over 1000 points. However basic gaming at 1080P with reasonable settings was absolutely fine for me. Whilst AMD themselves pitch this is a system for office productivity and multimedia, many of us want our PCs to be multi-purpose. As an entry point to PC gaming or for a child looking to do homework and the occasional game, it is pretty decent. Guess what, 9 out of 10 kids would rather play something, than nothing.

As a parent, buying a kid a gaming PC could lead to a world of STEM projects, programming and brilliance. A console, probably not so much.

If I was to compare this system to anything it would be the classic i7 9700K gaming CPU, but with a whole system at the cost of that CPU on its own - you really can't grumble at progress.

Guess what, Tech Data are exclusive on this platform in the Western Europe Region - so if you want some of this limited edition product. Just Holla!