AMD A10-6800K and A4-4000 Richland APU Review

[Guest]

I could not find the listing of the speed of the 8GB DDR3 ram. But this is a huge factor in the performance of the A10 chips.

 

[GhostRyder]

The ram used In the above benchmarks I believe was 1866.

 

[ET3D]

Mosu, comparing to a Core i7-4770K is silly and completely undermines your argument. You should stick to showing how the AMD APU's beat similarly priced Intel configurations in performance, or beat in price similarly performing configurations.

By the way for anyone who wants a good power comparison Tom's Hardware has one here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-6700-a10-6800k-richland-review,3528-11.html

 

[GhostRyder]

Mosu, comparing to a Core i7-4770K is silly and completely undermines your argument. You should stick to showing how the AMD APU's beat similarly priced Intel configurations in performance, or beat in price similarly performing configurations.

By the way for anyone who wants a good power comparison Tom's Hardware has one here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-6700-a10-6800k-richland-review,3528-11.html

I agree, the point of an APU is not to be the most powerful brute force processor and compete with the I7, it is a solution giving great gaming/media performance in a small package. The CPU does its job with the on board graphics and gives you a complete package to play games decently on a budget without having to worry about a separate GPU in the mix. The I7 is meant for high end gaming and a separate GPU, the on board is there for low power when not gaming.

 

[Guest]

First, let me say thank you for the review. However I would've liked to have seen the A10-6800k paired with some 2133mhz RAM for these benchmarks. APUs are heavily dependant on memory speed, and in getting the 6800k vs the 6700 you're paying for that built in 2133mhz memory controller and higher clock speeds. Also, the 6800k overclocks much better than it's Trinity counterpart - another review I read saw the 6800k get up to 5.0ghz easily and this gave it a sweet performance boost. Richland was a mild refresh to the Trinity lineup, nothing more. AMD is still planning on releasing Kaveri in 4Q13 - expect to see great things out of that.

I also agree with what someone said about using OpenCL benchmarks, as the APUs tend to shine in those. In your Adobe benchmark did you have OpenCL enabled?

Finally, for anyone talking about power consumption - First of all, it's a desktop. No one cares about battery life on a desktop. Secondly, Intel's TDP is up quite a bit on their new Haswell architecture, and doesn't do so well in the wattage arena either.

 

[ET3D]

I agree that OpenCL benchmarks are interesting, though I'd rather stick to practical ones than theoretical ones. The interesting thing in the results I've seen is that Intel crushes the AMD APU's in some OpenCL benchmarks. (In others AMD beats Intel.)

"No one cares about battery life on a desktop." That's your spin, but people do care about power consumption on desktop, and especially in an HTPC.

 

[Steve]

I agree that OpenCL benchmarks are interesting, though I'd rather stick to practical ones than theoretical ones. The interesting thing in the results I've seen is that Intel crushes the AMD APU's in some OpenCL benchmarks. (In others AMD beats Intel.)

"No one cares about battery life on a desktop." That's your spin, but people do care about power consumption on desktop, and especially in an HTPC.

Sorry I am a bit late to the party but for all those complaining about the lack of OpenCL testing we tested with Photoshop CS6 which by default uses the graphics processor to boost performance. Therefore we did test Photoshop CS6 using OpenCL.

 

[ET3D]

Sorry I am a bit late to the party but for all those complaining about the lack of OpenCL testing we tested with Photoshop CS6 which by default uses the graphics processor to boost performance. Therefore we did test Photoshop CS6 using OpenCL.

The fact that Photoshop CS6 can take advantage of OpenCL doesn't mean that the workload used in the test does. It stands to reason that if OpenCL was used then the FX 4350 with its Radeon 7970 would have had much better results than the A10-6800K. That's not guaranteed, of course, but the benchmark looks consistent with the relative CPU power, and I would have expected results using OpenCL to be somewhat different.

 

[Steve]

Actually all platforms used the Radeon HD 7970GHz in that test. The only tests we dumped the 7970 for were the IGP tests. What workload do you suggest we use? Have you got something hand picked?

I see the need to test Photoshop CS6 without the dedicated GPU and that is something we will add in future reviews with these kinds of CPUs.

PCMark 8 does have a pretty detailed Photoshop CS6 workload so we will probably use that in future.

 

[Jad Chaar]

The fact that Photoshop CS6 can take advantage of OpenCL doesn't mean that the workload used in the test does. It stands to reason that if OpenCL was used then the FX 4350 with its Radeon 7970 would have had much better results than the A10-6800K. That's not guaranteed, of course, but the benchmark looks consistent with the relative CPU power, and I would have expected results using OpenCL to be somewhat different.

AMD just signed a deal with Adobe to further integrate OpenCL. It probably wont be another few months before it is fully integrated.

 

[Guest]

Please stop using BF3 in single player as a CPU benchmark, it is totally irrelevant. In multiplayer you can see a big difference between CPUs, especially on 48/64 player servers.

 

[Guest]

I think the A10 Trinity improves drastically at 1866 and then the curve is gradual to 2133. From here...http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/46073-amd-a10-5800k-trinity-needs-faster-ram/?page=3

 

[mikee6888]

I'm a big fan of gaming consoles like PS3 online , PSP and a casual gamer for PC ; however, I find it interesting to know more about AMD's APU based on this review and I'm not buying a PS4 or XBox one just yet.