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Regular readers of Kitguru may remember our review of the AMD E-350 in March 2011. I really enjoyed AMD's Fusion technology but it was never marketed properly and subsequently wasn't quite the success it should have been.
AMD's A8 series chips made the headlines shortly afterwards and I particularly liked the unlocked A8-3870K when I reviewed it back in February this year.
Fast forward to October…. in another review today we are featuring the latest A10 5800k with onboard graphics when paired up with the ASUS F2 A85-V Pro. This particular review you are reading now however concentrates on performance when united with an AMD discrete solution and the Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 motherboard. Is the A10 5800k suitable as the foundation for a high powered gaming system?
AMD detailed the new Trinity APU around four months ago. The A10 5800K is a 32nm CoC with four Piledriver cores and a Cayman GPU.
This is no Bulldozer style core however, the focus is on getting power consumption under control and AMD have placed focus on the VLIW4 architecture to improve graphics efficiency. AMD don't want these new chips to be excessively priced either – the AMD A10 5800K should ship in the UK at a price around £94.99 inc vat.
The differences between Trinity and Llano are also significant.
AMD have created a new architecture with a higher transistor density to improve overall performance. The onboard 32nm HD7660D graphics runs at 427mhz core and 1066mhz memory. The 512MB of GDDR3 is connected via a 128bit memory interface.
The HD7660D has 8 ROPS and 384 Unified shaders.
An AMD diagram overview of the current APU range. The A10-5800K slots in right at the top of the chart, with 4MB of cache, a base clock speed of 3.8ghz and a turbo speed up to 4.2ghz. The maximum DDR3 supported is said to be 1,866mhz but as we will find out later, with the right motherboard this is ready to be broken. The ‘K' moniker, as always, is an indication that this chip is unlocked, ideal for the overclockers out there.
The prices of these A85X motherboards are stupid. I wouldnt pay this for a board for a £95 chip
Nice one AMD, im impressed with this chip. might think about getting one later this year, but I agree on motherboard price. it makes the whole deal seem less palatable.
Awesome stuff, love it.
Does kind of make me wonder when using a discrete graphics, that unless the on-board graphics hybrid crossfires with it, what’s the point of having have half the die of the chip made up of graphics. Being a gamer i wouldn’t be using the on-board, I know that it is a nice balance, but id love to see an AMD Piledriver sans graphics (Binary ?) with the full die for the CPU. Selfish maybe… 😉