Overall and Final Verdict
Now that we have seen the performance of the Richland APUs, what do we think? Well I was a little torn. The onboard video performance was very impressive on both APUs but the compute performance of each of them left me looking for a little more. It wasn’t until I went digging around checking out pricing that I started to understand. You see, right now we are in a bit of a lul right now when it comes to demand for high compute performance. Most games require more on the GPU side than compute and only a small portion of people really take advantage of the performance they have. These Richland APUs fall in at a price point that is well below Intel’s offerings while still giving the performance you are going to need day to day. Let’s be clear: Intel’s Haswell and Ivy Bridge CPUs out perform these in every compute task I tossed at them. But considering their price point they still aren’t a bad option. Their value goes up a lot more if you don’t plan on running a dedicated video card at all.
I was a little confused by AMD’s pricing. When checking out the two APU’s on Newegg, they are only a dollar apart. But considering how close they are in performance I guess it’s not too big of a deal. If you are worried about power the A10-6700 is the way to go with its lower wattage, other than that there isn’t any other reason to not go with the A10-6800K.
In the end, I won’t be building my next gaming rig with a Richland CPU. But that was never the focus of these APUs in the first place. I will however be checking them out when building a low budget rig for a family member or for a cheap HTPC that can game a little.
