Inside the drawer, in the dark, the A4-3330MX APU sat dormant. It wasn’t powerful. It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t remembered in any hall of fame. But its last instruction in active memory was the successful render of a victory screen.

Day one, Leo booted up Windows 7. The A4’s two cores chugged to life. Loading the OS took 47 seconds. Leo didn't complain; his last computer was a netbook with an Intel Atom. To him, the A4 felt like a rocketship.

Leo’s roommate, Marcus, had a desktop with an Intel Core i7 and a dedicated NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti. He mocked the A4 mercilessly. “Dude, your laptop takes a geological era to render a drop-down menu.”

Leo hesitated. He’d never even tried.

The A4 cooled down. The fan slowed to a gentle hum. It had done it. It had played a real game, at a real resolution, and won.

Leo moved his command center. The A4’s two Bulldozer cores—which were really one module with two integer clusters sharing a floating-point unit—grunted. The floating-point unit was the bottleneck. Every time a zergling rush happened, the chip’s logic units clogged up like a drain full of coffee grounds.

Then 25. Then, in a quiet corner of the map with no fighting, 30.

Leo downloaded the game. The A4 felt the data stream in. It was time. It diverted power from its CPU cores to its integrated Radeon HD graphics. The little graphics block—the Radeon HD 6480G—stretched its metaphorical legs. It knew it had no VRAM of its own. It had to borrow from the system RAM, and even then, it was slow. But it had a trick: asymmetrical crossfire? No, that was for the higher-end chips. It had nothing but raw, stubborn will.