Inspiron 11 3189: AMD A9 9420e version. Gaming netbook attempt #7

Ever since pretty much the days of the MSI Wind netbook, I've been trying to game on netbooks. Every time some new configuration comes out, I have to see what it can do. So when Dell released these, I ordered one as soon as I could get it below the $300 limit that I set to call it a "netbook." After all, these days if it was just about being under 13" I could just get a Lenovo Ideapad or Dell XPS, run Overwatch at 720p and call it a win.
Anywho, on to the new scrappy contender.

Dell Inspiron 11 3000 2-in-1 (3189)
AMD A9 9420e APU w/ Radeon R5 graphics.
4GB DDR4 2400 (@1866, see below)
500GB HDD
Same as all other Inspiron 11s in every other way. Same 11.6" touchscreen, webcam etc. as the past several years.

What is an A9 9420e?
There's a bit of confusion about that because it isn't really a thing. AMD doesn't make a 9420e, they make the A9 9420, normally at 10-25W TDP. Dell managed to limit it even further to 6W by underclocking literally everything including the RAM speed.
Here are the proper specs for the "e" version as Dell decided to call it:
CPU Freq: 1.8GHz base, 2.7GHz boost (vs. 2.5/3.4 in standard 9420)
GPU Freq: 720MHz (vs. 800 in standard 9420)
Memory Controller: 1866MHz single-channel (vs. 2133 in standard 9420)

What the heck?
I know right? AMD already makes an APU for that TDP, the E2. Dell just took a slightly more expensive part and crippled it to roughly the same performance as an E2. Why would anyone do that? As far as I can tell, strictly for video professionals. The A9 is the lowest AMD chip that can handle 4K decoding and also is significantly faster at rendering with that extra GPU compute core. Running at 6W, the benefits to gaming are not worth the added cost, especially after slowing the RAM down even more. So Dell made this thing so video pros can have something to dump footage into on the road, that is cheap and disposable. That's the best reason for this machine I can come up with.

I'm going to try to play games on it anyway.

Just upgraded the RAM and HDD. I only had a chance to test a couple of games last night. Fortnite is a no-go IMO. It runs at playable framerates, but the shared VRAM is so slow that trees and crap are popping up while you run and it actually harms gameplay. I did pull off Skryim and New Vegas just fine at low settings in 720p. They weren't exactly gaming PC smooth, but easily as good as playing them on Xbox 360 or PS3, so playable in the eyes of most. Any normal "netbook" games were no problem at all. It handles games like LoL, WoW or Dota 2 easily.

 

Just replying to myself to save room for more updates in the OP. Not trying to obsessively bump or anything.

I just submitted my first synthetic bench results to 3Dmark, PassMark etc. For most things I'm now close to the middle of the pack for same hardware (which is sad because that lumps me with all Stoney Ridge R5s, meaning I'm now in the middle of the pack vs systems at full TDP). For CPU though, since PassMark and 3DMark treat the "e" model as a different chip, I have the highest results. A blistering 2092 in PassMark CPU lol!

I need to do more testing before I'm satisfied they're final, but then I'll add them to the top post.

 

Is it possible to overclock RAM and processor to make it as efficient as standard 9420? Maybe there is a way to increase TDP and gain more power.

 

Very unlikely for this system. There have been a few cases with AMD APUs like the Llano and Early Bristols that could be overclocked with software like k10stat or Overdriver. The only other way would be by overclocking the entire system FSB like people used to do with SetFSB. Not easy to do at all on an APU, beyond my ability.

Beyond that, I'm already pushing it as much as the cooling setup allows. Unless you drill holes in the bottom and put in a fan, it would get too hot with anything but a very conservative overclock. It's actually very efficient, because it's doing this at half the Wattage of the normal chip. It may not compare to the same APU in a 15" laptop, but it destroys the overall performance of all other passively cooled competitors like the Pentium ULV. I'm pretty amazed.

 

Crappy, they NOW add removable Ram to that device. I bought one for my wife, thinking I could upgrade the ram, but alas....A no go on her device. I may give her 11 to my youngest son, and buy a new white one for her with the amd for the upgradable RAM. hmmmm. Decisions.

 

Just a heads up, this system is currently $229 at Walmart.com. Cheapest it's been on the 9420e/500GB model. You can also get it in red now, which was not available yet when I got mine.

 

I got mine at $249 at Walmart, installed a 250GB Micron MX500 SSD and 8GB RAM into it, and by just running MSI Afterburner (doesn't seem to be any need to even tweak settings, but I cranked them to full anyway) I get ~2x the performance in 3DMark Fire Strike than stock. It's actually a respectable 6W TDP gaming machine if you're into things from 2012 and prior. I get ~40FPS in the original Skyrim @ 1024x600. Some less demanding modern games run remarkably well too, like The Long Dark.

3DMark Fire Strike score of ~600, graphics score of ~700 (with Afterburner, way less without). I even had it playing PUBG in the new smaller Sanhok map at 8-10FPS 1280x720, but it was totally unplayable, input lag was unbearable.

It's a great little machine if you upgrade the hard drive and RAM, the portability is awesome and it can game decently. Unfortunately without the upgrades, you'll hit the 4GB limit with the shared RAM pretty quickly, and the 5400RPM hard-drive really is the weakest link.

I added some custom lower resolution widescreen resolutions using Custom Resolution Utility (800x480, 1024x600) and then added 1600x900 and selected that using Virtual Super Resolution to get even more screen real estate instead of the default 1366x768.

Also, if you replace the RAM you have to put new paste on the CPU, which made mine significantly cooler.

 

hmmmm custom resolution software? do tell! I may be able to use that.

 

How much Dedicated Video Memory do you have? Mine shows 128MB but benchmarks shows 80MB.

 

Did you monitor if your system actually maintains higher clocks under load? With my system, even after repaste, the GPU often throttles down to about 500MHz when running games. It still runs games like OG Skyrim at exactly the performance you describe even throttled, but I'm curious if yours behaves differently. It's just too limited by the APU's total wattage, does it even if it's not very hot.

The amount of vram it shows on an APU doesn't mattter. That's just the minimum it keeps allocated from the main memory at all times, since it's shared. There is actually no dedicated memory. Mine showed 80 with the stock 4GB as well, now shows 512MB with 8GB RAM installed. The amount of system RAM used by an iGPU is dynamically allocated by the system as needed.

 

Ok mine also shows 512MB as well. I can also confirm 16GB x1 ram is supported. No gains as really not worth it since processor isn't capable of running enough things to reach 16GB of ram and vram doesn't increase past 512MB (only reports that much regardless). Also upgraded hard drive to Evo 850 500GB Storage and thermal pate to thermal grizzly kryonaut. TDP is so pose to be 90C but mine throttles at 50C. I've noticed less throttling since I repasted thermal compound. Active cooling would increase performance. Thinking of porting the bottom of the case adding some copper heat sinks and a fan. Gains probably won't be worth it either way. If you can keep the temps down then turning of "powernow!" in bois will net you a bit of performance. LMK if you guys want me to test anything. I will post pictures and an excel sheet of performance gains.

 

The throttling around 50C seems to be another aspect of whatever was done to "e" this APU. I'm not sure if it's always based on temp though. When my CPU is not using up the wattage and power mode is set to maximize GPU performance, it goes up to around 65C before throttling. It might have more to do with the total power use of the APU, like if the CPU use goes down, the GPU can go a little higher before it throttles.

 

I definitely noticed that it doesn't seem to ever go past ~500MHz as well, wasn't sure if that was just me. I can't remember now, but I don't think I've seen the GPU go past 500MHz either.

 

Interesting, I see which ones are your score in the Geekbench browser now. I'm tr987

 

So I was able to hit 575MHz (GPU Core) Max on air and just for the heck of it I put it in the freezer of my mini fridge and there I was able to hit Max 595MHz (GPU Core) eliminating any temperature related throttling. All sources say clock speed should be 720MHz. Couldn't hit it even with MSI Afterburner with the two sliders maxed. Power options on windows 10 are also set to performance and AMD Settings for graphic profile set to optimize performance. Let me know if I'm doing something wrong. Remember those are maximum not averages.

If you want to see overall performance while in the freezer. Not my best CPU score.
https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V9/display.php?id=106347108233

 

I'm not even sure thermal throttling is the problem here. I have trouble getting mine to hit 50C even with stress tests. It's very sporadically more performant at times, and it's really hard to determine why. Sometimes it will be functioning at literally 30-40% of my peak performance and I have no way of determining when or why this occurs.

 

I'm editing my original post, because it turns out it's Windows 10 that's the enemy of this tiny dual core CPU by a long shot. Windows updates are the bane of its existence, because it feels like they're running all the time. 80-100% CPU usage all the time and you can't just turn it off.

I've tried the group policy settings and tried to disable Windows Update/make it manual, none of it works. I'm not sure how to mitigate the effect that all the Windows overhead has. I also feel like no other machine I own updates this often but maybe I just don't notice.

As an aside, I managed to hit 634MHz on the GPU, but I didn't achieve any magical new benchmark scores. This was after a sitting in the freezer, so the thermal thing might hold some weight. I only hit 554MHz on a third run of 3DMark at full temperature, so I can definitely hit over 500 at what seems to be max temperature after all. I don't see much past ~53C.

 

Yes it’s windows updates that give the impression of lost performance. You can open task manager and you’ll see that a windows service don’t remember the name. That being said you can disable it and do manual updates. Anti malware also slows it down a lot windows defender/ mcAfee. I neglected to mention that I was able to hit 65C after bios update and GPU performance was more consistent with the newest AMD Adrenaline software 18.8.1

https://www.amd.com/en/support/apu/...a9-series-apu-for-laptops/7th-gen-a9-9420-apu

 

I just finished moving, so I apologize for the slow response. I was stuck in an empty house for a week longer than expected with nothing but my phone hotspot and this 2-in-1 for computing. It was rough, but I did have a ton of time with the system to test things.

TDP vs. Temp
So just a little tip I re-discovered (forgot about my e-450 tweaking experiment). The TDP wattage is managed in total for the whole APU. So for example, if you set your system power settings for "Maximum Performance" or use the factory balanced setting and turn it to "Maximize Performance", the CPU will always sit at 2.7GHz and will use up all the power, causing the GPU to throttle as low as 200Mhz almost immediately. If you set it to balanced, it will only clock up as much as needed.

This has nothing to do with temp and is just because you have 6-7 Watts total, with no strict orders from the bios NOT to completely cripple one or the other suddenly.

Benchmarks:
Mine are the 2093 CPU Mark and the 563 GPU Mark. The 2143 CPU must be one of you two, because you would have to put it in a freezer or something to beat my scores lol!
I used GC Extreme thermal paste, I use flattened rice grain method to apply. Old school. Just FYI for comparison. I was actually considering a crazy cooling mod as well, but now I'm thinking I won't bother. It looks like it's power that's throttling me first, because it still happens when both CPU and GPU are taxed, even if I'm keeping it cool with an ice pack and fan.

So far the most impressive thing I've run on it is Sea of Thieves at "Cursed" settings (540p, 30fps max). Managed to get about 15-30fps. Not really playable in a game where you are constantly hip-firing while moving.

EDIT: Also another funny note. The NotebookCheck page for the A9 9420e is not correct, so don't think your RAM should go faster. They just copied my notes almost verbatim from the benchmarks I uploaded when the system was new, yet got a few things wrong. Yet they turned me down for a job as editor years ago. The irony.

These are the parts that are inaccurate:
1) CPU speed maxes at 2.7GHz, not 2.5GHz
2) Memory controller limited to 1866Mhz, not 2133Mhz
3) The max TDP of the only two existing a9 9420e systems (this and the Lenovo 110 nettop) max at around 7W, so no clue where they got the estimate of 9W. I would kill for 2 more.
4) Both the Dell Inspiron 11 and the Lenovo system using this APU apparently max at 65C, not 90 as listed on NotebookCheck. Doesn't matter though as you rarely get it that hot with the low power. This seems really common with AMD APUs, where AMD rates them for 90C and manufacturers limit it to get better energy efficiency ratings.

 

2143 wasn’t me although I did fridge it. What you said about choosing cpu or gpu to be better via power settings because of maximum wattage makes sense. I was scratching my head thinking it was a thermal issue. Maybe I could get better benchmarks via your trick but like you said it’s not really worth it. I’ve had fun experimenting with this little cheap laptop. I’m like why did I put 16GB RAM, 500GB Samsung Evo 850, and Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut? It was fun even if it wasn’t worth it. 8GB of RAM and a small SSD would have been fine. 4GB of RAM isn’t enough ever.

 

I would say put a pin in it. In a few months, a whole load of cheap laptops will probably use this or similar APUs. Once that happens, a bios modder usually gets ahold of it or somebody figures out a way to tweak it with software. If you look back at a few of my old threads on systems with APUs, like the Asus K53ta with its old Llano A6, crazy things can happen when features get unlocked.

 

Two things. 1. You put that stuff in because you could! and 2. 4gb is enough for people like my wife who surf the net, and do basic work on their computers. I would love to be able to pop in that extra ram into hers just because tho!

 

Also there's value in testing with different parts. I put in a larger version of the same brand and series of RAM stick. I also used a super cheap SSD that I use for testing. So for @Joshua Mancriffe to use high-end parts, just to see if they could perform better is worthwhile. Also those parts are great for almost any current laptop, so not a waste to have around period.
I would have been stoked if better quality RAM could have gone above 1866MHz, too bad that wasn't the case.

Also @kojack that's really too bad about your wife's Inspiron. It looks like that is the very last one that didn't have replaceable ram under the heatsink like this one. Other Intel models also have that ability. Even with more memory though, if she needs an upgrade I would aim higher.
I got this system on sale for $250, but there have been better deals on 11-13" systems if I just sat on Amazon, eBay and BestBuy.com for a couple of months. A Lenovo Ideapad with an i3 would absolutely destroy this system in every possible category and you could get one in the middle spec range for about $300 on sale. If you bought a refurbished system or on open-box, you could probably get a better system for even less than this one costs now.

 

I was using it yesterday, it’s fine but I think it will be better when I put the sshd in it.

 

Upgraded the 3185 model with a 6gb/s SSD; noticed the perfomance improved significantly. Had to convert the OS to UEFI boot with the built in Windows 10 MBR2GPT.exe to access efi shell since I've noticed quite a bit of throttling without upgrading the stock 4gb RAM chip. I haven't discovered any tool yet that can backup the BIOS file and dump the IFR txt to disable the power limit settings causing the CPU to throttle. Gaming was also less practical; Watch_Dogs ran without sound until I updated the dxwebsetup.exe online and it was a bit choppy with lags even after disabling RadeonSettings.
The throttle limit may be the underlying bottleneck but I'm yet to upgrade the RAM to 8gb.

 

If someone could mod the bios I think we have enough thermal potential to get more performance as I've been able to prove!

 

Here's a step by step guide. Inspiron BIOS files can be extracted using a python script.

https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/6438-guide-dell-e6530-cpu-tdpmulti-unlocking/

 

I also managed to have a look at the EFI structure using PhoenixTool.exe
(Download version 2.66 from http://rgho.st/78ySZ8ZVk)
Placed the BIOS update file in the same folder as PhoenixTool and input all the details_manufacturer etc except for RW file. SLIC and SLP are in same directory. SUCCESS. Clicked structure and now I can decompress the required module. Not sure which would alter the power limit causing throttling yet. Continue at own risk.

 

I replaced her hdd with a Kingston SSD, Totally different machine. It's very quick and quite usable now.