Pros: The AM1 platform was a lovely breath of fresh air when it came out. It took a step back from the rat race of performance to realize most people don't need more than what CPUs circa ~2008 could do and delivered that in an extremely cheap and low power platform.

Cons: AMD hasn't made a followup yet. A Ryzen desktop CPU series like this at 25w would be amazing.

Overall Review: I wouldn't try using AM1 with Windows because of its heaviness, but almost any Linux distro loves these little CPUs.

Pros: Quiet
Reliable
Some multi-tasking
Low power

Cons: Heatsink, AMD drivers

Overall Review: Used this little guy in an inexpensive build for a media pc to fit in an extremely crowded control booth at a church. Handles multiple displays (3 native + 4 using video scaler). Handles 2 live presentations, a separate video que and audio recording without stutter.

Did not find the heatsink to be difficult to install like some have reported, but was puzzled why the base is "undersized." Cannot recall the last time I encountered an heasink which did not fully cover the processor

The driver issue is not the fault of the CPU. Even before the acquisition by AMD, ATI never seemed to be able to produce drivers that weren't quirky of not just downright bad. The latest driver caused a constant BSOD. No big deal, really, just rolled back to a restore point a week earlier and problem solved.


I wish these were still available from more sources, but the Raven Ridge are a great replacement in the HTPC markey, even if they consume nearly 3x the power because of the increased workload they can handle.

Specs:

AMD Athlon 5350
MSI AM1I Motherboard
Team Elite 8GB DDR3 1600
Microsoft Windows 10 Home - 64-bit
SAMSUNG 850 PRO 256GB SATA III

Pros: low power

Cons: might be a little underpowered but it is so low power you can just put a little cheap video card on it and its great

Pros: Great little low-power dual core. Plenty fast for my needs.

Cons: I haven't experimented with loading the processor up heavily. Nightly data compression is probably the heaviest job it has to do, for which it has been ample.

Overall Review: This has been running my little backup and file server for three years without a problem. Low power means less cooling; means less fan use; means longer fan life and less dust accumulation. With the ASUS AM1M-A motherboard and 16GB of ram, it has performed exactly as advertised. AMD + ASUS = happy customer.

Pros: It's cheap, quick enough (on par with a Q6600, say), and uses very little power.

Cons: Heatsink is a little tricky, and no PWM on the fan.

Overall Review: I'm currently using this in a tiny little ESXi server. Paired with a MSI AM1I motherboard, 8GB of 1600MHz DDR3, a 2 port server NIC in the PCIe slot, a 60GB SSD and a 320GB HDD, it runs pfSense, 2 Debian servers, and a Windows VM without issues. None of it is incredibly fast, but it does the job without fuss.

Pros: This thing runs very cool even with the stock cooler. I'm running Windows 7 64 bit and with the system relatively idle the CPU is running at room temperature. Even running CPU and GPU tests simultaneously didn't get it anywhere near its maximum temp. I suppose I could easily overclock the system, even with the stock cooler but my main goal is low power consumption.

Cons: The fan isn't completely silent. It's quite enough but it would be awesome to have a passive cooler since I'm using it as a media player/server.

Pros: -Very Cheap
-Very cool
-Cooler is very quiet
-Extremely low power draw
-Easy overclocking even on the stock cooler
-Performs well enough on its own to handle most stuff 720p

Cons: -The cooler is bad with long term temps, over about 9 hours i watched the idle 20c temps change to idle 30c when everything else was still cool, while all coolers do this, usually the chance is only a few degrees
-The cooler is extremely difficult to install
-The AM1 platform is mainly two hole cooler mounts on motherboards, making other coolers hard to install, boards like ECS's Kam1-I have 4 holes however, and support other coolers
-Woefully underperforming in 1080p
-Has issues sometimes with higher resolution video, 1080p50fps is ok, but 60fps can be choppy

Overall Review: This is a great little processor for the budget oriented or simple task build. I bought this for my sisters computer, the build was this Athlon, a 750ti, on an ecs kam1-i board. Also included was a 450w apvexia psu, 16gb of ddr (just spare sticks i had) in a cooler master elite 110.
Its not much, the total build was less than 200$. But its more than enough to handle what she wanted to play, namely Minecraft, Runescape 3, Fallout 4 and a bunch of older games like OSRS, Empire Earth and Halo 2.
The APU alone can handle all of those. At 720, not fantastic settings, and definitely not 60fps. But still very playable. With the 750ti in there it smashed through these games at maxed out 720, and even some low 1080p.
It lived up to my expectations and then surpassed them by a mile. Not once would i think that a budget apu, and budget gpu would get me great performance like this.
She currently has minecraft maxed out with shaders an ten million something mods and its still going great at 50-60fps in 720p, or 30-35fps in 1080p.
I couldnt be happier, she couldnt be happier.

Granted, thats with a 750ti. The testing i did with the apu on its own was about what i expected too, but not much more. Youre looking at low medium graphics in 720p for most light games like LoL or Dota 2 in order to get above 60fps. Games like CSGO can do low 60fps, medium around 40, high to very high is going to be sub 30fps and not playable.
On its own the APU did what you could consider medium settings in minecraft in 720p. Medium levels of things like smooth lighting and particle effects, a render distance of 10 chunks, easily getting 50-60fps.

Due note, that with any APU, you will greatly benefit from higher memory speed ram. This is one of the few instances where the difference between DDR3 ram speeds actually makes a difference, and i even tested that just to make sure what others said online is correct.
With 8gb of HyperX Blue at 1333mhz, i got 30fps in maxed out 720p minecraft.
With 8gb of Corsair Vengance LP 1866mhz ram, i got 38fps at the same settings.
Because its an APU, its using your ram as video memeory, and faster video memory improves framerates drastically.
So if youre getting this and new ram, shell out the few dollars extra to get the highest speed your motherboard supports, you will notice a performance increase.

For the tl;dr version:
Its a great APU for the price, on its own it handles plenty of common games at playable settings, and paired with an equally cheap budget GPU, you can get a great little quadcore system that handles 720p and some 1080p on the cheap.
I will be using this APU again in the future.

Pros: I had no trouble installing the little guy and I have to say that paired with other decent components it does, overall, a great job of running the HTPC. For the very small power requirement you do get quite a return. I have it paired with 8 gigs of ram and for the most part it takes care of business pretty swell.

Cons: Even knowing what this is designed for I am have still found myself underwhelmed a couple of times. This first one should be taken with a grain of salt because it only happened badly with one streaming service that worked just fine on my other computers, but it had trouble properly playing any 1920x1080 stream from that service. I know it's not the (wired) network. Also has occasional and mostly barely noticeable hiccups when playing back video files from the hard drive at that same resolution. Lastly its abilities when it comes to playing games -- obviously this isn't for gaming, that's what my desktop is for...but for example it was able to achieve decent/playable FPS running Far Cry 3 at 1920x1080 yet not nearly playable at the same resolution for the game Rogue Legacy which should be far less demanding. Scaling down the resolution took care of choppiness and framerate but I just thought it a bit curious to compare the two.

Overall Review: I'm not disappointed with this product. I've had it for about nine months now and it has been solid especially considering the price. That said when I make the next upgrades or additions to the HTPC I am considering purchasing a graphics card to accompany the cpu, in which case the appeal of this style of processor diminishes a bit. I thought the point of this was that I didn't need to add a separate card to get my expected results.