AMD A8-9600 Bristol Ridge Quad-Core 3.1 GHz Socket AM4 65W AD9600AGABBOX Desktop Processor Radeon R7

Pros: Performance is good for the price.

There's never noticeable heat coming out the back of the PC even under a full load (eg. parallel linux kernel compiles.) The stock cooler is perfectly adequate, if a bit whiny sounding. You might want aftermarket cooling but you won't need it. This "65 watt" part uses the same die and runs at similar clock speeds as the 35 watt A10-9700E processor. Differences between that part and this one are minor, so I suspect its worst case power dissipation is not much more than 35 watts!

The AM4 socket gives you an upgrade path to Raven Ridge. Raven Ridge will be a much more capable APU. It's likely to cost more than a Bristol Ridge, and it's not likely to be available as a boxed desktop processor until the middle of 2018. Meanwhile Bristol Ridge is your only option for APUs on the AM4 socket, and this part is the best value among the Bristol Ridges.

I had no trouble using the integrated graphics in Linux with the older 'radeon' driver. The newer 'AMDGPU PRO' driver doesn't seem to support Bristol Ridge yet, as of this writing. But the older generations of AMD drivers are still able to run the integrated GPU on Linux, at least for basic desktop stuff. I haven't tried gaming.

Cons: Performance could be better if this APU had 4MB of on-die L2 cache. Older APUs like Kaveri and Trinity had 4M available, but the Bristol Ridge parts top out at 2M of L2 cache. AMD claims the L1 caches are improved and that 2M is adequate, but it feels like a step backward. Maybe AMD is worried that if they make this part too good it will cannibalize Ryzen sales, so it's crippled a bit. And that's a shame. It would be more future-proof and could handle difficult workloads better with a 4M cache, or more! C'mon AMD!

The cheap A8-9600 and the top-of-the-line A12-9800 are equally crippled in terms of L2 cache, so you might as well save the cost difference between them if you are looking at any Bristol Ridge. The lowly -9600 is just as good as the -9800 in every respect except for core clock rates. Unless you game, you'll never notice that difference.

Overall Review: None

Pros: solid little budget option.
has integrated video to help reduce cost

Cons: Runs 8 lanes of Video PCIE to the processor instead of 16, which means you cannot run dual video cards. I was building a system with the idea of running dual video cards for the higher number of monitor outputs, and this was disappointing. Most people will not need that but it was an issue for me. I bought another CPU and this one is sitting on the shelf

Overall Review: I wish I knew about the PCIE lane issue before purchasing this chip, but most people will not have that issue. Personally I wish I had not spent the money on mine.