Earlier this year AMD introduced their Kaveri APUs and I had the chance to take a look at the A10-7850K. While I wouldn’t consider is an enthusiast part, I came out of our testing seriously impressed with the improvements AMD has made on the GPU side of things. I thought the new Kaveri APUs would be perfect for HTPCs as well as budget gaming rigs. Well today AMD is officially announcing a few new APUs that fill in a few gaps in that product line. The new APUs are the A10-7800, A8-7600, and the A6-7400K. While the architecture is the same, the new models do have a few interesting standouts. For one the A6-7400K is unlocked and has a low price to compete with the Intel G3258 Anniversary Edition. The other one that caught my eye was the A10-7800. It shares similar stats with the A10-7850K but with nearly half the power usage! Today I’m going to take a look at the A10-7800 to see if it is as exciting as the numbers imply.

Product Name: AMD A10-7800 Kaveri

Review Sample Provided by: AMD

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

As you can see above the A10-7800 is similar to the 7850K in a lot of ways. They both have the same GPU and core count. Where they differ is the 7800 has a slightly slower CPU clock speed and lower TDP. The 7850K is also unlocked where the7800 isn’t and of course there is the nearly $20 difference in price. Otherwise you are still getting a Kaveri APU on the FM2+ socket.

Our Test Procedures and Test Benches

CPU Performance

I jumped right into benchmarking with the A10-7800. To start things off I jumped into the CPU performance side of things. The onboard GPU is exactly the same as the 7850K so I really wanted to see how much of a difference the slight clock speed difference would make. Additionally after our 7850K review I added PCMark 8 to get a better idea of how well the 7800 would handle real world tasks using OpenGL and without OpenGL. Not surprisingly the 7800 came in behind the 7850K in all of our benchmarks. In X264 HD its performance was down near the A10-6800.

Cinebench is still one of if not my favorite CPU benchmark because it gives me a chance to test the overall CPU as well as a single core. This is a great way to see how well the actual architecture performs as well as compare performance between 6 and 8 core CPUs versus 2 and 4 core CPUs. In this care the overall CPU came in just barely under the 7850K as expected. The single core test was hit a little harder, it’s obvious that Kaveri relies on clock speed to really push things.

The Passmark CPU score showed once again that the 7800 performed just barely under the 7850K. This is an interesting test because some of the older APUs actually perform better than both Kaveri APUs. With this chip performing like its big brother, it shows that this is an architecture issue or drive issue, not a fluke in our testing.

PCMark 7 had a little bit larger difference between the 7850K and the 7800 than our other tests. Enough for the 980X to slip past. That really goes to show you how much things have improved. The 980X is a 6 core monster CPU that cost $1,000 when new and the 7800 is getting nearly the same numbers in this benchmark with a MUCH lower price. In PCMark 8 the performance difference between the I7-4790K and the A10-7800 wasn’t as big as the price difference might imply. We will have to get more testing to really see what the results mean.

wPrime tells the same store on its 32M benchmark with the 7800 performing just under the 7850K.

Okay now we are talking, in 3DMark Fire Strike the A10-7800 came in at the bottom of the charts, but that is when compared to a stack of Intel CPUs that cost up to 7 times as much.

You can expect a one to two FPS difference between the Kaveri APUs. More importantly, three of our the four games tested really didn’t show a big difference at all between the much faster CPUs and the budget A10-7800. Hitman: Absolution did hit the CPU hard though with it making a HUGE difference in performance. Most games are GPU limited though, as long as most of the games you play fall into that category you could easily get the same gaming experience with the A10-7800 as you would a $400 or $1,000 CPU.

Onboard GPU Performance

Although the A10-7800 shares the same GPU as the A10-7850K that I tested previously, I still had to run it through the same onboard benchmark suite that we run all CPUs through (well all CPUs with onboard).  It’s interesting to see how some of the benchmarks are affected by the slightly lower CPU clock speed while others aren’t. In the end, just like with the 7850K the 7800’s onboard GPU performance was still extremely impressive. Once again, the Kaveri’s pull well ahead of the Intel CPUs in nearly every benchmark. This is especially true in our in game benchmarks  where the 7800 pulls twice the FPS as the CPUs that cost two and three times as much.

Cooling and Power

As I mentioned before, one of the biggest things that sets the A10-7800 from the A10-7850K is its lower TDP. For all of my testing I ran the TDP at the default 65 watts. You can however drop it down another 20 watts to save even more power. To be fair, I did our power testing with it set to the same TDP that I did the other performance benchmarks, so you can expect lower numbers if you decide to turn things down slightly. The lower TDP isn’t important in a normal build, but should you decide to build a small form factor PC or HTPC lowering the TDP can mean lower temperatures and smaller power supply requirements. So where did the 7800 land? Well it landed smack in the middle of the 4790K and 4770 from Intel on the load numbers. It still pulls more at idle than the Intel CPUs though.

The A10-7800 really performed well when I put it under load using Prime95 to try to heat things up. The highest I could get things warmed up was 44 degrees. This is especially good when compared to the 4790K and 4770K.

Overall and Final Verdict

Much like the A10-7850K, once I finished testing the A10-7800 I came out impressed with the onboard performance. It was able to push 3 out of the 4 games benchmarked at nearly the same speeds that the much more expensive CPUs from Intel did. Most games are GPU limited, as long as most of the games you play fall into that category you could easily get the same gaming experience with the A10-7800 as you would a $400 or $1,000 CPU. Even the CPU performance was more than you REALLY need for day-to-day use.  I do still wish that we would see an APU from AMD that could compete on the CPU side with what Intel has out currently though. More importantly in some of our benchmarks the 7800 came in below APUs a few generations old, I would prefer to see improvements across the board generation to generation.

There are two area’s that the A10-7800 really impressed me though. The optimized TDP that runs 40 watts less than the A10-7850K with only a small drop in clock speed is nice. The lower TDP isn’t important in a normal build, but should you decide to build a small form factor PC or HTPC lowering the TDP can mean lower temperatures and smaller power supply requirements. The other perk of the A10-7800 is its MSRP of $155. This is $20 less than the 7850K with nearly the same performance. In the end the A10-7800 is a great pick for an HTPC or small form factor build although I think if you were on a budget you could get away with using it in a gaming PC build. The money saved would be well invested in an even better GPU. That is assuming you aren’t playing to many CPU dependent games like Hitman: Absolution or Civilization 5 of course. 

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.