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
Specifications |
|||
Model |
A10-7800 |
A10-7700K |
A10-7850K |
Core Name |
Kaveri |
Kaveri |
Kaveri |
Microarchitecture |
Steamroller |
Steamroller |
Steamroller |
Socket |
FM2+ |
FM2+ |
FM2+ |
CPU Cores |
2/4 |
2/4 |
2/4 |
CPU Base Frequency |
3500 |
3500 |
3700 |
Max Turbo |
3900 |
3800 |
4000 |
TDP |
45W or 65W |
95W |
95W |
L1 Cache |
192KB 64KB |
192KB 64KB |
192KB 64KB |
L2 Cache |
2 x 2 MB |
2 x 2 MB |
2 x 2 MB |
Graphics |
R7 |
R7 |
R7 |
GPU Cores |
512 |
384 |
512 |
GPU Clock Speed |
720MHz |
720MHz |
720MHz |
Max DDR3 Speed |
2133MHz |
2133MHz |
2133MHz |
MSRP |
$155 |
$135 |
$173 |
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
Our CPU Test Benches for each CPU tested |
|
AMD Socket FM2+ |
Asus A88-Pro Kingston HyperX 128GB SSD Kingston HyperX 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM Noctua NH-U14S heatsink Cooler Master V1000 Power Supply Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
AMD Socket FM2 |
Asus F2 A85-V Pro OCZ Agility 3 120GB SSD Kingston HyperX 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM Noctua NH-U14S heatsink Cooler Master V1000 Power Supply Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
Intel Socket 1150 (Devil’s Canyon) |
Asus Z97-A Kingston HyperX 3000k 240GB SSD Kingston HyperX 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM Noctua NH-U12S heatsink Cooler Master V1000 Power Supply Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
Intel Socket 1150 (Haswell) |
MSI Z87-G45 Gaming Kingston HyperX 128GB SSD Kingston HyperX 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM Noctua NH-U12S heatsink Cooler Master V1000 Power Supply Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
Intel Socket 1155 (Ivy Bridge) |
Crucial Ballistix Tracer Ram 1600Mhz 2x2Gb Intel DZ77GA-70K OCZ Agility 3 120Gb SSD Noctua NH-C14 heatsink Cooler Master Silent Pro M 850Watt PSU Two Nvidia GTX580’s for SLI testing Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
Intel Socket 2011 (Sandy Bridge-E) |
Intel DX79SI Motherboard Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600MHz Quad Channel Ram Two Kingston HyperX SATA 3 SSD’s in RAID 0 Intel Active Thermal Solution RTS2011LC Water-cooling Cooler Master Silent PRO Gold 1200w PSU Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Highspeedpc Test Bench |
Intel Socket 1155 (Sandy Bridge) |
Crucial Ballistix Tracer Ram 1600Mhz 2x2Gb FATAL1TY P67 Profess1onal Series Motherboard OCZ Agility 60Gb SSD Noctua NH-C14 heatsink Cooler Master Silent Pro M 850Watt PSU Sapphire HD6970 BF:BC2 Edition for AMD testing Two Nvidia GTX580’s for SLI testing Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
Intel Socket 1366 |
Gigabyte G-1 Assassin Gaming Motherboard EVGA Classified GTX580 Video card Cooler Master HAFX Nvidia Edition Case Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3 Ram 1600MHz Cool-It Water-cooling Cooler Master Silent PRO Gold 1200w PSU Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue SSD |
CPU Testing Procedures |
|
Bioshock Infinite |
Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Xtreme” quality setting. |
Tomb Raider |
Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Xtreme” quality setting. |
Hitman: Absolution |
Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Xtreme” quality setting. |
Sleeping Dogs |
Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Xtreme” quality setting. |
3DMark Fire Strike |
Physics Score – Performance benchmark |
wPrime |
1024M and 32M |
X264 HD Benchmark |
Pass 1 and Pass 2 |
Cinebench |
CPU and CPU (Single Core results) |
Passmark 8 |
CPU Mark Score |
PCMark 7 |
Full benchmark Suite |
Power Usage |
Idle and load testing using a Kill-A-Watt and Wprime to put the cpu under load |
PCMark 8 |
Home test is run both with and without OpenCL |
Onboard GPU Testing Procedures (for CPu’s that have built in GPU’s) |
|
3DMark Fire Strike |
Performance setting |
Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0 |
Extreme preset |
Cinebench |
OpenGL benchmark |
F1 2013 |
Ultra preset |
Bioshock Infinite |
Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Medium” quality setting. |
Tomb Raider |
Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Medium” quality setting. |
Hitman: Absolution |
Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Medium” quality setting. |
Sleeping Dogs |
Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Medium” quality setting. |
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.