AMD have kindly supplied us with an OEM model of the A10-6790K for testing today. As this is an OEM sample, it is devoid of any retail packaging or bundled accessories.
The A10-6790K is based on the same Richland architecture as the A10-6800K that we reviewed back in June. Consequently is features the same advances over the previous generation which include support for 2133 MHz memory instead of 1600 MHz. As the onboard graphics card utilises the system memory, this promises quite a bump in graphics performance over the previous generation.
As it's name suggests, the A10-6790K is almost capable of the same performance as the A10-6800K. When comparing the specifications side by side, they are identical apart from the clock speeds, both featuring four cores and 4 MB of on-board cache. The base and turbo clock speeds both come in 100 MHz lower than those of the A10-6800K at 4.0 GHz and 4.3 GHz respectively.
We mentioned earlier in the review that this particular model carries the ‘K' suffix at the end of its model number, signifying that it is completely unlocked. This means, with minimal effort, the clock speeds could be bumped up 100 MHz each to match those of the A10-6800K. While the wholesale price of the A10-6790K only comes in $10 lower than the A10-6800K, the difference in performance can easily be made up through overclocking.
Like the A10-6800K, the A10-6790K features the AMD Radeon HD 8670 GPU onboard. This boasts a clock speed of 844 MHz which is linked to the baseclock, meaning you can overclock the GPU portion of the chip too if desired.
Great price for what you get. ideal for a media center, which I have been meaning to build all year, but never got around to it 🙁
Wouldn’t an i3 have been a more appropriate comparison?
Nice Finally somebody tested a richland APU with 2.1 ghz memory! Cudos to the review team. I personally use 2.4 memory and it’s even better like that – you should have used 2.4 memory for the oc… the gpu part in this is really memory starved and I’ve seen huge increases.
@Steve why is not appropriate to compare it to the i5 – it offers similar day2day performance even if it’s lagging in pure cpu the more then capable gpu makes up for it + its way cheaper 120$ for AMD vs 180$ Intel(newegg) and this chip would eat an i3 4340 for instance alive… even if intel is selling the i3 for 160$ – well I guess it’s not illegal to be dumb or a fan now is it…