This is our second of two reviews today, focusing on the official launch of AMD's A10 5800K when paired up with partner motherboards. In our other review we have paired up the new AMD APU with a high end AMD discrete graphics card to see how it compares against a Core i3 and Core i7 system. Many people say that you don't need an ultra high end processor just for gaming so we though it was interesting to specifically cover that topic. The review you are reading now however concentrates on the onboard HD 7660D graphics. Is 1080p gaming finally a possibility if don't want to buy a discrete card?
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 overclocking audience out there.
looks like a great chip from AMD, I havent though that in quite some time either. Intel must be worried !
Asus make great motherboards, but the prices of these A85X motherboards are stupid. I wouldnt pay this for a board for a £95 chip
I wasnt expecting this to be that good, so im shocked. I can see this being really popular for media centers and small chassis builds.
If they did a deal on motherboard and chip for £130 all in, that would be great. I can hope!
I noticed on the Cinebench test that the A10 smashes the Core i7 2640M at standard clocks. Obviously it wouldn’t get near a desktop Intel i7, but this result must be a strong indication of what A10 can do in Ultrabooks, no? How much will A10 get crippled to fit inside a mobile solution?
Yeah ill be getting one of these chips at some stage, but I might wait until it hits a mobile platform near me