AMD A10-6800K Richland Review

Introduction and Technical Specifications

| Source: AMD Price: £116.99 Author: Jonathan Stones

Introduction



With recent in-OS fixes, game patches, and a great many games being designed around their architecture, AMD haven't been doing too badly when it comes to their CPUs when compared to how they were before. This is great for all end users, as a stagnant market with little to no competition stunts progress and hitches prices up.



Though their standalone CPUs have been dwindling in popularity, their Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) are way ahead of the curve. Pairing a relatively low powered processor with a decent on-die graphics chip is perfect for a HTPC on a budget. The iGPU can deal with HD video playback with no problem, and it's even able to play low powered games at decent framerates, albeit with lowered settings.

And so we get to today, with AMD's new APU range, 'Richland', successor of Trinity. We get to take a look at Richland's top dog, the A10-6800k, and see how it compares to it's predecessor, the A10-5800K, and also Intel's best match, the i3-3220. This APU comes with four fully overclockable 'Piledriver' cores at 4.1GHz, a memory controller capable of handling 2133MHz memory, and an AMD Radeon HD 8670D for its graphics solution. The updated architecture is said to excel in applications which utilise OpenCL, so we'll be factoring that in with our tests.

We've been praising APUs for a while now, so it's time to see how the new kid on the block settles in.

Technical Specifications

Richland is still based on the same 32nm manufacturing process as Trinity, but with a beefed up core and a stronger graphics solution there doesn't seem to be anyway for this not to be a great release. The high end chips, the A10s, are treated to a stronger memory controller which, when paired with high speed RAM, should help boost the capabilities of the iGPU.

This latest range is to be released with many different APU models, but as ever with AMD's aggressive pricing it's not going to break your bank to purchase the model that we have with us today.

1 - Introduction and Technical Specifications 2 - Test Setup 3 - Power Consumption and Temperatures 4 - AIDA64 5 - Cinebench and POV-Ray 6 - Media Transcoding Using Handbrake 7 - x264 and wPrime 8 - SiSoft Sandra Page 1 9 - SiSoft Sandra Page 2 10 - SiSoft Sandra Page 3 11 - PCMark 12 - 3DMark 13 - Alien vs Predator and Counter-Strike: Source 14 - Bioshock Infinite and Catzilla 15 - Dirt: Showdown and SimCity 16 - Hitman: Absolution 17 - Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs 18 - Resident Evil 5 and 6 19 - Unigine: Heaven 20 - Unigine: Valley 21 - Conclusion «Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Next»

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