You do not understand what budget or inexpensive mean. An i5 complete platform costs few more than an a10 system, but for many people few dollars matters
If no dGPU is allowed, then the AMD wins (in games and OCL/HSA only)... but would you seriously NEVER add a dGPU, even a year or two later? The moment that you do, you've essentially wasted your money on AMD. That's why the budget argument never makes much sense to me. You'll spend more over time buying ineffective budget rigs than you would if you spent more less often.
If you're comparing Intel and AMD, as soon as you add the dGPU there is no reason to buy AMD. The CPU portion of the A10 is more comparable to an i3 than an i5 (and much worse single-thread perfomrance), you're paying for the iGPU more than anything.
AMD's A-series processors make the most sense in cheap laptops that would never get a dGPU. Half-decent GPU and CPU performance make sense there. But if you're talking desktop, the second you add a GPU the value proposition flies out the window.
AMD CPU power efficiency is also a 2.4:1 ratio to Intel.
For example, AMD's FX-4350 is the most competitive CPU they have (in price) to an i3-4330. The i3 completely destroys it in most benchmarks, yet it uses 54w and the FX uses 125w.
That's anywhere from $8-$15/year in power usage depending on the workload. Ammortize that over 4-5 years and you may have just spent $50 more in electricity on the AMD CPU. This doesn't account for additional HVAC costs (air condition needs to run more to cool a room with AMD CPU's, increasing energy usage even more)
It's the same fact over and over. AMD is irrelevant because of their dinosaur manufacturing capabilities. They're always 2 generations behind Intel.
Did you really not even read my comment? I clearly stated a range for a users workload. I didn't just give a universal figure.
$8-$15 is the range from average workload to 100% workload. And that's assuming you're rate is $0.08/kwh. Parts of the country, such as Socal, are upward of $0.24/kwh. This means, at full load, AMD CPU's would cost about $1.00/day if run at full load 24/7, an extreme scenario, but the point was they use around 2.4x more power.
Unfortunately for AMD, that figure isn't a consistent scale in their favor; AMD CPU's idle at nearly quadruple the power of Intel's because they have no high-K dialetric to completely powergate unutilized sections of a core. All they can do is shut cores off, meaning one full core will always be on.
I was focusing on 100% workload simply because that's the least embarrassing presentation for AMD.
Well, different benchmarks taken by computerbase.de show that the 7800 actually idles at lower power consumption than the i3. From my own experience i can verifiy that, but only for mobile CPUs/APUs. I did own a msi gx60 and a gt60, and the gx60 was giving me about 30% more runtime from the battery. and except for compiling the linux kernel, i couldnt tell any difference in everyday performance. (Of Courage in some games the a10 5750m was limiting performance when the i7 3632qm did not)
Well, one module would still be on, meaning two integer cores still being active. Still, there's nothing stopping a user from undervolting them and making significant power savings.
but as you can see, if you have the Kavari GPU 512 config, it uses 65 watts minimum. That's waaaay to hot for a laptop. AMD makes great integrated gpu's but they produce comparible heat and power to a separate dedicated keplar or maxwell part.
AMD is being held back by being reliant on external FAB's. Intel is shrinking every 2 years and has a huge advantage. 14nm baking now, vs 28nm everyone else is on.
and microcenter only has about 12 locations lol. basically you gotta live in a huge city, and the cost of living offsets any discounts you'd get from a cheap cpu.
There's a Microcenter not too far from where I used to live in Ohio, and it wasn't really what I would consider a large city by any means. It was a pretty standard suburban area. It was about 40 minutes (give or take, I only went a couple times and I never had to drive) from my house, and we lived in pretty much the middle of nowhere.
OK - if you are using Microcenter, you can buy an AMD A10 7850 + motehrboard for $129, which is no where near the price you above above. This is with a mediocre MB (good enough for most people), but even a better one would only drive the price to $160.
I haven't purchased a discrete Graphics Card in over 6 years. I've gone with Intel HD in the original 655K I5 CPU .. and now have HD3000 in my i7-3770k.
I will probably buy my very first high end laptop (I always go for middle of the road laptops) with a Broadwell I7 CPU with IGPHD5200 (with the 128MB L4 cache).. With a good fast SSD, I don't imagine I will feel at all comprimised... Day to day use it will feel as quick as all of the super rigs loaded with fans folks are still building.. I don't GAME... so what's the point in a dGPU?
Graphics, and monitor compatibility, up until Haswell. With Haswell, graphics performance (drawing, photo, video, CAD, etc.). Ivy Bridge's IGP, FI, couldn't keep the res right on my Dell 1080p monitors at work. This is 2014, and I still need a video card just for that? I can't speak to IB, but through SB AutoCAD's graphics would be glitchy with Intel's IGP (parts of a viewport not refreshed, or offset from where it should be), as another example. Haswell seems to have gotten rid of those problems.
REAL budget gaming machine? $45 socket 1150 motherboard, $75 Haswell Pentium G3420 dual core CPU, $120 Nvidia 750 Ti... $240 total. Good on CPU, and graphics runs circles around those both for the same price out of the gate. Forget the i5 or A10.
Pentium G3420 - 53W TDP Geforce 750 Ti - 60W TDP Total - 113W TDP Form Factor - Full ATX / MicroATX Pros - better CPU single threaded performance Cons - higher TDP (more power consumption), higher noise level (more fans "CPU + GPU“), more heat, bigger size
A10-7800 - 65W TDP Total - 65W TDP Form Factor - MicroATX / Mini-ITX Pros - lower TDP (less power consumption), lower noise level (less fan needed), lower heat, Small Form Factor, can hybrid crossfire with low profile discrete GPU Cons - lower CPU single threaded performance
sure u can find the mini-itx intel motherboard for G3420 + 750 ti, but the high TDP (higher power consumption) still the matter we will care on this days, and the A10-7800 system could fit in the console size thin and slim casing, while the G3420 + 750 Ti system will not.
The calculation for power draw should probably take the idle numbers instead of the max. Or you could weight it to assume the cpu/gpu are idle 50-80% of the time.
Someone who games 8 hours a day probably will get a discrete graphics card regardless of power costs.
the owner of the cyber cafe with 50-100 units gaming rig will care for the power cost, if the APU with lower power consumption can handle the games in medium setting at least, they will go for it.
A real budget Desktop PC based on AMD for gaming is going to be the A8-7600. The performance numbers are so close and the processor is also ~$100. The pricing on the 7850K doesn't make sense. The 7800 begins to get reasonable. The A88X chipset is a smidge better than the H87 from a feature standpoint. I think the 7850K should be around $145 and the 7800 around $125. Yes, AMD would take a hit on margin, but I think the volume could be better.
the 65W TDP A10-7800 & A8-7600 are good enough for day to day computing + gaming, the intel-i5 may give u 2.5% more performance for the extra 25% cost for day to day computing but not for gaming, u still need to spend more for the dGPU if u wanna games, but that means the cost, TDP, heat & noise and your power bill will be increasing as well.
again, i don't actually see what you're trying to say here. the system power usage of almost any intel i3 or i5 are a good amount lower than almost anything AMD has, and that's with far higher performance. the same argument about the dGPU can be made about AMD, but with worth propositions because then you've actually bought an APU for absolutely no reason.
again, we use both Intel CPU (without discrete GPU) and AMD APU here, we see no big different on applications which need a lot computing power, maybe a few second faster on the Intel system, but we see a big different for application that need a lot of graphic power, AMD APU shine on that area. the average joe that buy an system for day to day computing like online, office document, video playback, online games don't even need to computing power from the i5/i7, the core 2 duo or even Pentium 4 can be satisfy for them, you've actually bought an i5/i7 for absolutely no reason.
because you are too stupid to understand and see the different or you just a plain blind Intel fanboy sheep, we all know that Intel CPU alone had little bit lower TDP than AMD offering, but the integratedGPU on the Intel CPU sucks big times, anyone in the right mind who build Intel system for gaming will sure need a discrete graphic card by geforce or by radeon, than it totally makes the Intel systems TDP far higher than current AMD 45W/65W APU, we already see that the 45W/65W A8-7600 can handle many modern games on medium setting, that pretty amazing for building a cybercafe gaming rigs, the owner with 50-100 units gaming rig build with AMD 45/W/65W APU will make profit and save money from cut down a lot power cost, the single chip AMD APU will also produce less heat than the intel cpu + discrete gpu, less heat in the cybercafe means less air condition needed = less power = cost saving, the single chip AMD APU will also produce less noise than the intel cpu + discrete gpu, less noise in the cybercafe lead to better environment quality for the cybercafe, that's make the big different which the kids like you can even see.
Catch 22: 1) AMD kicks ass if you want to game on integrated graphics only. 2) If care about gaming you'd never use integrated graphics only. Therefore AMD's kickass integrated performance is only available people who don't care about gaming and don't need AMD's kickass integrated performance.
I own an A10-7850K and I game on the iGPU exclusively. I primarily play older titles, but the performance is there for what I'm playing: Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, Rage, even a little Battlefield 3 from time to time...
1080p on high settings for older titles is not only playable on the iGPU, but gets 60 FPS on some titles. What more do you need for HTPC/light gaming duty?
I picked up the APU/Motherboard as a combo at MicroCenter for about $150 after tax. It fits in my slim HTPC case, runs cool (doesn't need the fan ramped up high enough to make it audible) and does what I need it to do.
The problem is that so many people become so focused on one single performance aspect that they overlook the myriad use-cases for these APUs, of which small-form-factor HTPCs are one. The A10-7800 is running the same iGPU with slightly lower-clocked CPU cores for less money, with a lower TDP, making them viable for even more consumers that do not have the need of a dGPU, but still want to do some casual gaming, which I bet encompasses a lot more people than the typically enthusiast crowd that frequents a site like Anandtech...
1. 65W Kaveri A10-7800 costs $155, 65W Haswell i5-4590S costs $200 2. The only proper mobo comparison is A88X vs. Z97 - both are high-end, and in general A88X mobos are cheaper. 3. For the price difference between A10 and i5 you can allways buy more expensive dGPU that will make A10 system faster than i5 system!
I'm not sure I agree about the sentiment of wasting money on an integrated GPU if you get discrete graphics a year or two later. While it might be true today, the benchmarks including OpenCL performance show just how powerful a good APU can actually be, meaning it's an ideal physics accelerator even if you're using discrete graphics for pushing pixels. The issue really is whether games are going to take advantage of it, but I'm really hoping it will become a trend; it's certainly an area where AMD could really do with pushing some kind of physics on OpenCL library, as it's a prime candidate for an APU, even in a system with discrete graphics.
But if you're looking for a properly budget system then an AMD APU is absolutely the best option IMO. Personally I wouldn't suggest the A10's for that though, but comparable A8's (are those out yet?) as they are far more cost effective, you could even get your system below $200 and still play a lot of games on good settings.
" but would you seriously NEVER add a dGPU, even a year or two later?" No, I wouldn't. If I was so restricted that I couldn't buy a decent lowly dgpu... and would keep things simple , probably with lower power consumption too. But this scenario is not valid even in developing countries, the exception being some really bad places where people actually starve. But these people, exactly because of their situation don't have any chance in computing. So, AMD is in a really bad situation, but I don't believe for a moment that is actually a lack of talent responsible for this. What I am really afraid of , is maybe we have reached a kind of dead end(maybe temporary it doesn't matter). So, tech companies don't offer novelties, because they simply can't have any, or they are too few to waste hastily. Perhaps the new paradigm is not close and people in tech are panicking.. perhaps.
The lowest priced i5 is $40 more than this, with only a 3 Ghz/3.2Ghz turbo. Then you consider needing to spend at least $100 to get good GPU performance, and +~$150 is not exactly in the same price bracket when we're talking about budget.
The A10-7800 is slower than a dual-core i3-4330, and is only $38 cheaper than either the quad core 3.2GHz/3.6GHz i5-3470, or the quad core 3.2GHz i5-4460...
For that extra 25% cost, the i5 will give you at least double the performance...
OMG. did you ever had a reality check? double performance? daily usecase there are 2 things slowing down a system:
the choice of HDD vs SDD the stupid windows OS.
All the rest is unreal theoretical benchmarking from review sites. the problem is as you and many more show every day, they actually believe theoretical benchmarking as true real performance.
Double performance for what? I upgraded a while back from a Phenom II to a Core i5, and I have to admit the performance difference was minimal, as far as I could tell. going to an SSD is what really made things faster,and games are limited by my graphics card. For anyone using integrated for occasional gaming, AMD is a much better choice.
You can make an argument that AMD is a good choice for a gaming rig, since you can save so much on the processor + MB that you can get a better graphics card. For example, if you buy the 3.9 Ghz quad-core A8 6600K + motherboard for $100, you have $200 left to buy a graphics card - given a $300 budget.
This is true. AMD's processors generally offer good value, but terrible power efficiency... and they're often in the position where they've got the lowest absolute cost, but not the best performance-per-dollar.
Seriously, WTF? People that are encoding are not going to buy an APU. Stop with the fanboi nonsense. I have a quad core i7 processor in my main rig. I do whatever I want. However, I don't give a crap about gaming so I just have an $200 card just so I could do whatever I wanted without the machine hiccuping.
My wife doesn't encode, game, video edit or just about anything cpu intensive. So I got her an AMD APU recently after Athlon 64 X2 finally crapped out. Paired with a SSD and 8gb of ram it flies for her all important tasks of surfing the internet, typing Word documents, streaming Hulu/YouTube videos and the occasional online survey. Tell me why she needs a Pentium/i3/i5 or whatever super premium cpu you nerds can come up with? Tell me how she would even notice the difference? She doesn't even know what WinRAR is let alone understand how she could save a couple of seconds in packing/unpacking such a file. Yeah, it could be such a bitchin' machine if only... duh. All I care about is reliable and quick for her purposes. She'll be able to do anything she wants to do and it will breeze through any of those tasks. We had the internet go down yesterday and she couldn't figure out how to unplug the cable modem for the Time Warner rep and you're worried that she will take too long to convert her videos? Face it. She waits for me to come home and do it all for her. Of course, she sounds like a techie when it comes to her mother. Yeah, there's no place for an AMD apu. </sarcasm>
Wowzers, you're really missing the point. You think people don't need the cost/performance of the i5, which offers 100%+ more performance for 25% more money? Fine, that's a perfectly valid argument.
Except the i3-4330 included in this very review was significantly faster than the a10-7800, used less power... and costs at least $15 less.
In terms of accusing me of "fanboi nonsense", I've owned multiple AMD processors, and multiple AMD GPUs, stretching all the way back to the K6-2. But their current CPU product lineup is simply not competitive, except possibly at the very low end... and the a10-7800 is *NOT* at the very low end. It gets outperformed by cheaper and cooler Intel processors.
sounds to me like she doesn't even need the integrated GPU either. the integrated graphics of and core i3 sound more than suited to what you're wife is doing, from the sound of it. so what is she using the "superior on board video" of the more power hungry amd apu for again?
Look, I buy Intel chips for my high end rig. I use the horsepower. The price difference is negligible between the competing processors. The power usage doesn't matter to me in the slightest. To me the Kaveri will be sipping on the juice. I keep my boxes on 24/7 and I just don't have that high of an electrical bill. I only have my wife turn off her pc at night because of the fan controller's bright blue lights (her pc in in our bedroom). My wife likes to stream shows from the computer to an HD television while surfing the net on her monitor. I figure the extra headroom on the AMD APU would drive that without issue. Whatever the case, I just don't think the purchase is a waste like many are making it out to be.
Where's the 45W performance numbers? Where's the power consumption numbers in 65W and 45W? How well does it work in the low power mode? Is there not speculation that it took so long because there were issues with the product? What are the clocks in 45W mode?
Most of the commenters below are remarking about dGPUs, Crossfire, and budget PCs.
The price difference is significant. If you add a "decent" GPU then plan to spend around $200-300 more (including taxes) than the AMD system. That covers the costier i5 and a half-decent GPU like an R9 270.
There are some instances that having a 2C/2T CPU will begin to make less and less sense as time goes on; for example, BF4 performance is reduced compared to the i3s and especially so compared to the i5s/i7s, but whilst this may become more and more common as time goes on with newer engines, there's still plenty of titles that a Pentium will shine in. However, will the frame latencies be acceptable? The following article does pose some interesting questions...
I think you are right. The 4-core processors are way more future-proof. Single-thread performance has been very important but has also stagnated. Plus, we all know that the consoles are multi-core machines and game programmers will have to work with well-threaded engines.
It's one of those situations where the more threaded an engine becomes, the more Kaveri should outperform Piledriver due to not having the decoder switching between threads all the time. Piledriver's saving grace is clock speeds, but if AMD was to be able to release a Kaveri refresh, I'm sure they'd have mastered the 28nm process by then and be able to get a bit more speed out for the same power.
I liked article a lot. The author makes a good point about cpu to gpu balance.
Therefore, if frame time variance will be examined in the future with 2C/2T processors I would hope appropriately sized discrete cards would be used. Maybe R7 260X or smaller (at suitably low resolution and detail settings) is a good starting point for testing 2C/2T processors in the future?
If you lower the budget (take out the graphics card) you can get an A8 6600K + MB for $99.99 at Microcenter. For light gaming this will way outperform the Intel solution with IGP, anf be plenty good enough for all other uses.
Precisely. vs an i3-4330, an A10 7800 = 20% higher TDP + 10-20% lower performance even in quad-core optimised apps (Handbrake, etc) and up to 47% slower per core. It's better at games, assuming you "enjoy" playing PC games like it's still 1997 (1280 x 1024 5:4 aspect ratio + low quality textures + no-AA), which is about as useful as those old THG's benchmarks testing every game at 640x480 to "prove a point". The number of gamers looking to buy a modern CPU with a 19" 5:4 monitor is "ultra niche" to put it politely (unless that res was chosen precisely because it cannot handle smooth gaming at 1600 x 900 / 1920 x 1080)...
Seriously people, if you're playing any modern games, just end the "brave masochism" and buy a 2nd hand budget discrete card. I've saw 4x 7790's going for under $40 on EBay the other day and 1x 7850 for not much more. That small premium is worth it regardless of CPU for a +150-200% boost in fps and the ability to actually play with 21st century resolutions...
Both the XB1/PS4 are struggling to get anywhere beyond 792p/900p and 30fps so IMO it's a fair comparison to them.
That's about the only space I can see Kaveri making any sense, in the extremely-small-form-factor boxes designed to sit under a TV unobtrusively. Board $75, memory $75, chip $150, HDD $50, case and PSU $50 ... comes out nicely to the $400 mark for a "complete system" (still needs KB/M/OS) that would be able to game about as well as the current-gen consoles and still be a PC when it needs to be.
Though frankly I'd rather the vastly improved performance at the same price point by allowing space for a dGPU and building a 750K or G3220 system with a 260X.
xbox one and ps4 soc has over double the SP's, Cache, and die size than this part, and much more cores. It can do 1080p just fine, but developers are prioritizing high polygon and high res textures over 60 fps gaming.
Would have been nice to have seen gaming results with some of the three games included in the free bundle, as well as some more demanding games. Also no cpu test results from a low end i5, which is only about 30 or 40 dollars more than the A10 and would have made the cpu performance look even worse.
Really, unless you are using some application that uses HSA or open CL, or trying to build a SFF gaming box without a discrete card, dont see much place for this processor. The price is also still to high. Should be a 120.00 at the most.
I was surprised that there were no platform power consumption benchmarks, was there a reason for not doing/including those? I'd like to see what kind of real-world power savings you pick up from 95W TDP 7850k -> 65W TDP 7800.
If i recall correctly they completely stopped adding power consumption numbers around the time ivy bridge came out, and in every single cpu article a few people ask for them and in every single cpu article those people get totally ignored.
My view is someone at intel is putting pressure on anand, and until i will believe it until i hear otherwise.
There were platform power benches in all of them. Haswell-big has idle/load for a smattering of i5's/i7's, Devil's Canyon had an OC overview of system power consumption. Same with Kaveri.
The A10-7800 65W looks like a winner in it's market (budget gaming). Unfortunately, that's not a very large market, and if you're looking to upgrade the CPU down the road, you are quite limited.
On a side note, it seems odd that 1280x1024 was chosen as the resolution for the gaming benchmarks. It's been probably a decade since the 5:4 aspect ratio monitors have been sold in the mainstream. 1440x900 or 1600x900 would make more sense, with similar total number of pixels.
I'd like to see a move to 1280x720 or 1600x900 for these sort of low-end graphics parts. Most living room TV's are 1920x1080, but depending on your set-up 1280x720 or 1600x900 might still look pretty good.
1600x900 is the current mid level gfx setting for mobile reviews; 1366x786 is the low end level. don't know why it couldn't be added to IGP benching too. The next time the IGP benchmark process is updated either of them would make more sense as a target. 1600x900 is closer in terms of pixel count; but 1366x768 is probably a more realistic option for most IGP gaming if only a single resolution is tested, since only the highest end IGPs can get FPSes high enough to play at anything higher.
Umm, NewEgg has 146 different monitors with 1280x1024 resolution available. They're definitely still extremely mainstream, and there are only two resolutions that they have more selections for, 1920x1080 and 2560x1440.
Still available if you're looking to buy an older budget monitor or are in the market for refurbished, but they are basically only being made to wholesale to cheap businesses these days.
I guess I wouldn't call something "mainstream" just because some vendors have leftover stock at non-competitive prices, but I see we have differing definitions of the word. I also wouldn't consider SCSI HDs to be "mainstream" but Newegg does a considerable stock of those as well.
Don't confuse number of choices with actual popularity.
Not a budget desktop - you'd be much better of with a cheap intel cpu and a discrete gpu. Then you got a great upgrade path to an i5, and better gpu in the future. As for extra cost of gpu, well you can get a second hand one off ebay cheap, or probably scrounge your game loving friends old one and that would still be faster then the A10.
Only place these really make sense is a budget laptop, where you can't upgrade anything so need the best balanced solution upfront, but these aren't laptop chips.
I find that in the games benchmarked the A8-7600 isn't far behind (-2.3%; -5.8%, -8.8% and at most 11%), and sometimes even ahead (+3%) of the A10-7800, at only 2/3 of the cost. Seems to be more of a budget gaming winner, at least in terms of the price/performance ratio.
Ian great review. One thing Id like to see on CPU reviews the inclusion of a single highend CPU and a minimum baseline CPU. In this review all the hardware was more or less in the same range so it is hard to get perspective relative to the ultra high end and the very low end. Keep it up man!
Is there seriously no power consumption tests? wow. And there's no tests to compare kaveri vs a G3258 + a modest discrete card such as a HD7750. wow why even bother with this review, it tells us nothing. Luckily another side was a bit more competent and their data shows a 34 watt increase at the wall vs an 54W TDP i3. Shocking. All that extra power for less performance. I really want to see the data showing a G3258 + discrete outperforming kaveri in Perf/watt. Imagine the horror of spending billions of dollars to purchase a GPU company and spending and years to integrate its IP only to still be worse than your own discrete gpu combined with your competitor's CPU!
From other reviews on the web, it looks like the 7800 is good for ~85w under load. Oops. No wonder performance is so close to the 7850k. Of course, maybe we'll get some anandtech numbers using a 1200w "noisy" psu eventually.
It looks as if there needs to be a simple investigation into the clock speed "sweet spot" for Kaveri. There's been the odd article on SA that shows that the top mobile APU usually performs at 2/3 the speed of the top desktop part albeit for about a third of the TDP, so it's worth proving.
" News from Intel might change that with Broadwell, as back in May an announcement regarding a socketed, overclockable Iris Pro CPU would be coming to market."
Kaveri: Fantastic if you absolutely require IGP gaming. Otherwise, humiliated by a $60 Pentium.
I'm sure that AMD must have done the research, but I'd be astonished if the intersection of: 1) Willing to buy non-Intel CPU 2) Interested in gaming 3) Unwilling to invest in a dGPU Is big enough to be profitable.
Or perhaps it's just the least-unprofitable niche that AMD feels it can compete in, having largely ceded the server and high-end desktop markets to Intel, in addition to their questionable mobile story.
I miss the AMD of yore, but buying up ATI seems like a better decision with each increasingly-lackluster CPU release...
Having bought a i7-920, pentium 3220, i7-3770k, i7 4770k, I can say CPU speed matters way more than iGPU if you are not gaming.
General use - internet/email, you may think cpu speed doesn't matter, but it does. You might get your email to open "instantly" instead of waiting 1-2 seconds.
watching videos - "gpu acceration" with a gtx 670 just irritates me as the pixels are all meshed and audio becomes out of sync when you seek through the video. I just use the cpu.
creating videos into 264h content - if you use gpu acceleration, no to encoding runs will produce the same result, in the end, you'll want to use the cpu for consistent results, unless you want to do a quick rip to your ipod, in that case just use quick sync, it's very fast.
file compression/extraction - cpu speed matters here especially compression.
file copy - cpu speed matters. If you ever run a low end cpu and try to copy at 100MB/s you start using a non-significant portion of your cpu.
I've never run into a case outside of gaming where even the GMA 900 with the 915G chipset wasn't good enough, and what ever iGPU intel is using now is much better than that. If you are a "light gamer" and play mostly flash or shockwave, i would say intel igpu is still "good enough." If you are doing "budget" build your monitor would probably be on the "budget" side too, and wouldn't be good enough to display your games at high res or without significant ghosting at high frame rates.
I'm not an intel fan boy or an amd fan boy, I just go with what suits my needs best. In the end, I ALWAYS read what AMD is up to because the one thing I am waiting for is, AMD manages to run all their cpu-floating point operations through their iGPU. THAT would be very interesting. Similar to the FPGA added to the upcoming line of intel XEON processors.
Does the A10-7800 still suffer from the power delivery issue from previous articles? I thought I heard it might be related to the CPU's being from an early batch. Is this now a non-issue?
From http://www.anandtech.com/show/7914/msi-a88xme35-re... "In our recent FM2+ motherboard reviews [1,2], one of the common themes has been the ability of the motherboard power delivery to cope with temperature. When the power delivery is too hot, the system may cease to function or various benchmarks fail. Over-engineering the power delivery to be efficient has benefits, but increases the cost of the product. When I pulled the A88XM-E35 out of the box and saw no heatsink present, I was worried that the same issue would rear its head, and it did. Without additional VRM cooling, the A88XM-E35 caused an instant reboot on some of our more strenuous benchmarks (Agisoft, Handbrake). Therefore it should be noted that the results of this review were taken with an additional fan on the VRM cooling, and users of the A88XM-E35 should bare this in mind."
Also, it would be awesome if you covered Dota 2 for these IGPU's because it is the most popular game in the world. On a A10-5700 at 1920x1200 I need to run almost minimum settings to insure I never go under 10 FPS. I would have expected better from the best IGPU's around.
Tom's hardware covers Dota 2 and it seems like it might be poorly optimized because it's getting half the FPS of the intel card. Not sure. If it is poorly optimized... http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-7600p-kaver...
By the way, the min FPS in that Dota 2 performance article seem too high. They may not have had any really big visible fights in that test. Here's how I test Dota 2:
0. Enable Fraps benchmarking on F12; record frametimes at least; stop bench after 500 sec or so 1. Dota 2 -> Play -> Create a lobby -> Create Lobby (not local; local is CPU intensive and reduces FPS) 2. Join a slot 3. Edit settings: - Game mode: all pick - Check `Enable Cheats` - Check `Fill empty slots with bots` 4. Start game and choose `Faceless Void` (`Warlock` is another good choice). Both have ults which can slow down a slow computer when the ult happens 5. Use these cheats (hit enter to bring up chat box; type `-gold 100` in chatbox to get 100 gold for example) - `-lvlup 24` (level yourself up to level 25) - `-item item_travel_boots` - `-item item_assault` - `-item item_refresher` - `-item item_mjollnir` - `-item item_butterfly` - `-item item_bloodstone` - `-levelbots 24` (level all the bots up to level 25) - `-givebots item_shivas_guard` - `-givebots item_bloodstone` 6. Note these cheats: - `-respawn` to bring yourself back to life - `-refresh` to give everyone full health, mana, and to remove item cooldowns 6. Start the benchmark 7. Teleport to mid and attack until benchmark ends. Make sure to use `Chronosphere` and `Refresher Orb` so you can place 2 Chronospheres at once. Use `-refresh` to reset cooldowns to continue the attack. Bots will use `Shivas guard` a lot so there's a lot of special effects occurring. 7 - alternate. Using `Warlock` is a little different. You need `Aghanim Sceptor` to get the full effect from his ult.
Note: On my A10-5700 with graphics maxed at 1920x1200, I will get less than 5 FPS during these fight scenes. These are not infrequent occurrences. These are the most important moments of the fight.
Looks good and the adjustable TDP is a great feature for different applications (NAS or media server etc). It seemed really improbable a little time ago, but we are really approaching playable territory for many modern games without a dGPU. I would really love to see TrueAudio and HSA work in more games and applications...
Someday, I will be able to read the name of this processor without then spending 10 minutes singing to myself: NANA-NANANANANA-NA-NA-NA, Ka[ta]veri Damacy.
So... when is this AMD center bullshit going to stop? Because I really can't help thinking anything else than that I'm reading an advert instead of a quality review. I'm seriously avoiding reading any AMD-related Anandtech articles in fear of ending up here.
amd needs something up there sleves... this is not it. An intel (i7 4500U 15W!)cpu in my laptop out-performs this disgrace.... i miss amd. APU or not, i dont think people care that much about trivial performance like this. it pains me.
it is an ultra low voltage CPU . i7 4700MQ is a great deal but for me i5 3230M + Geforce GT 740M/Radeon 8750M is a good deal . Of course , the more the better .
just for shiz and giggles.... how about qualcomm start making desktop grade equipment. they need to! intel now has a total monopoly right now. cmon qualcomm come at me!
Enthusiast make cpu performance to be much more important than it actually is. For most everyday use (web surfing, web video, etc) there isn't going to be too much subjective difference between any modern cpus. For gaming, the cpu is also becoming mostly irrelevant. If you play at 1080p or greater with a dedicated gpu, you have to go down to a very low-end cpu before it will make much of any difference. This may change when DX12 comes out, since they are supposed to be making it more multi-threaded. This may favor cpus with 4 or more threads eventually, but one should not buy computer hardware based on "eventually". I wouldn't even bother overclocking a cpu for gaming these days. I would consider water cooled gpus and such for a high-end gaming machine though.
AMD is presumable working on stacking memory chips in with their gpus and apus, but this will be a ways off and may be limited to mid-range or higher. Any added step in processing adds the possibility of failure of the final package, which increases cost. It seems like they could achieve near dedicated gpu performance with an integrated memory chip similar to iris pro, but perhaps this is too expensive. It also may cannibalize dedicated gpu market. Intel doesn't have that concern since they have no dedicated gpu market.
I have also wondered why they don't put a gpu-like memory interface on these apus and just solder everything onto the board. This would deliver dGPU like performance and would be great for mobile and SFF; it would be very similar to what is in the PS4. It would have low cpu performance due to power limitations, but not that many applications actually require more cpu performance these days.
AMD has more gpu power available on-die, so they need to add something like Intel's quick sync or other software/hardware features. The APUs should not lose in video encoding and such when they have more processing resources available. Is the OpenCL accelerated version of handbrake available yet? Several of the applications under cpu benchmarks can be gpu accelerated, and several of them that cannot be gpu accelerated are probably not really relevant. Any of these chips are fast enough for web browsing. I am still using an old core2duo laptop for web browsing, and it mostly works fine. The memory size (<4 GB) seems to be more of a limitation than the cpu speed.
these chips serve their purpose in my opinion. amd does seem to get a lot of bashing, some deserved I will admit, but again it all depends on what you will be doing with your pc. if you shop around, you can pick up a nice board and cpu for relatively cheap. my most recent build is focused around the asrock fm2+ itx motherboard and a 7850k. using a fractal node 304 case, I have 6 hard drives and a 250gb msata ssd, along with a xonar stx sound card. my killawatt meter is in front of me and its reading a 44 watt draw while typing this. obviously the drives are asleep at the moment. the cpu is clocked at 4.1, gpu 960, mem speed at 2133. just to give an idea on power consumption.
With HP and Lenovo both using AMD APUs in mainstream notebooks, including HP in their business lines, clearly they are doing something right with the latest APUs, even outside of our bubble (like having good enough real-world performance per dollar and Watt).
I get CPU-limited in games a few years old, don't even have a >=1080p monitor, and AMD doesn't even produce a CPU as fast as mine. "Gaming," is quite varied in terms of performance. AAA shooters, and most games also on consoles, will not need much CPU, because even the latest consoles are running Atom-class CPUs (the prior gen would get laughed at by current Atoms). Games tuned for each platform, or just on PCs, tend to be much more CPU heavy, or at least capable of being so (usually resulting in what amounts to a different game).
Re more processing: they don't have more CPU processing resources than Intel's CPUs. If Handbrake intends to maintain quality over speed, FI, don't expect much gain from any GPU acceleration. GPU accel works well for some video processing, and depending on program used, can make a big difference in speed of editing videos, but not so much encoding. The image viewer is all I saw that definitely should be able to be accelerated by the GPU, though the 3D particle bench might be able to be. The rest are very much cases for CPUs, not at all GPUs. Not that there isn't a lot that can be accelerated, but of the chosen things to test, there's not much there that would be a good case for it.
That's a bit low. I'd take a Vishera or Kaveri over a Celeron any day, as a current daily user of a Haswell Celeron. If you were used to a 4MB/die or 6MB/die Core 2, or a Phenom II w/ L3, or better, a new brand Celeron would be a palpable step backwards, while most of AMD's APUs are quite capable, and only feel slow when faced with long-running CPU-limited tasks.
a.) Lack of power test results is worrying. b.) Why are the gaming benchmarks done @ 1280x1024? Why not do 1368x768 and 1680x1050 and 1920x1080? i.e. the resolutions of most monitors
Aside from that, looks grim for AMD, absolutely no point to these APUs - even if the power usage is indeed efficient, we're looking @ desktop not laptop chips. The only scenario I can see them being useful is in tiny HTPC/mITX builds where you're not using a dGPU. Otherwise as many have commented, a pentium + dGPU will smoke kaveri at not much extra cost. AMD better pray that OpenCL takes off in a big big way.
Personally, I would love a ~50-80 dollar version with just a minimal IGP and ECC support for low power file server / virt platform.... intel cores are expensive :)
They tested hd resolution as that is a valid scenario for most: play modern or slighly older games on hd maxed out with 30-60 fps or more. This excelent. The simplicity of kaveri the noise level and heat outup are quite ok plus the less hassle with one extra fan for the dgpu. You can even play aaa games of this year on these chips and they are perfectly smooth on hd. Moving to fullhd you will need to tone down the graphics a bit to get smooth frames...
Compelling GPU performance.....yet, I don't game anymore. I hope AMD could catch up with CPU performance, at this rate, the CPU will become the bottleneck for their integrated GPUs.
I know DDR3 2400 isn't officially supported but given how cheap CL10 stuff is these days (a few more bucks than 2133) it would be nice to see gaming benchmarks for 2400 too.
Given the nearly identical performance of the A8-7600 and its ability to run at 45W TDP and its significantly lower price (over 30 euros here), I see no reason to buy the A10-7800.
Like a lot of people these days I'm unemployed and have to save money wherever I can. My overclocked q6600 is fast enough for almost everything except some of the most demanding new games. Here in Denmark electricity is very expensive, so I'm thinking about upgrading to something more efficient, but because my funds are limited I can't replace all my components in one month. After reading about power efficiency and and game performance, a dirt cheap motherboard, 4GB DDR3 and the overclockable pentium anniversary edition seem like the best route. Then I will "recycle" my Nvidia gtx 260 graphics card until I can afford the power efficient gtx 750ti. Of Course 4GB isn't optimal but that's also easy to upgrade later. I dont like the idea of upgrading my old quad with a dualcore without HT but looking at gaming benchmarks it seem I would need a 6 "core" amd to keep up with that, and that wouldn't be power efficient. The small pentium AE is dirt cheap and with a intel socket 1150 based motherboard I can upgrade the CPU to a i5 when games start to require 4 cores. Hopefully I can get a new i5 cheap in a year or so... But I do fear that AMD can't survive because they seem so far behind intel. This is really sad because I do remember intels pricing before AMD "conroed" the cpu war with the mighty Athlon. So please support AMD a bye their products, sadly I can't afford to do so!
This APU seems like 6-7 yrs late. I don't think it's competitive at all and even Intel's newly released SOC meant for mobile will catch and beat AMD APU in less than 2 years. They need to get their chip design competitive fast or soon ARM SOCs will take over the low price desktop market. I think Chromebooks are already outselling AMD notebooks.
Good review. I'll buy a laptop with that APU or any with quad-core @2.5GHz or higher
Since they play good 1280 * 1024 with lot of total pixels compared to 1366 * 768 They are way 2 good for games at 1366 * 768 resolution as most laptop with them are at that resolution.
Glad to see AMD working on getting TDP down, and it appears it didn't cost them much in performance to cut it by almost third. Perhaps there is something to be said for allowing a node/arch to mature instead racing to the next?
Lots of people here saying there is no sense behind the AMD solution and there is. Clearly. The only problem is that its really niche. My dilemma: I want a quiet HTPC. I need it to be cool running as well because it will be on most of the time as my file server. It needs to be cheap. It also needs to be flexible. My original solution was a celeron g530 (stock cooler), Radeon 5450 (passive), 4GB RAM, and a ton of HHDs. Case was roughly 3U. 2x 120mm fans intake/exhaust. To be honest it wasnt bad. And it was cheap. The whole damned thing. But I quickly lost flexibility. No issues with the CPU. At 2.4 ghz It felt just as snappy as my 2500k in XBMC. But the passive GPU idled at around 122 and coasted at 135. In turn it caused my chipset to heat up. I know these temps dont scare most but I like peace of mind. So I thought about adding a cheap discrete GPU but the smallish enclosure and cheap card would lead to too much fan noise. i could recycle my 260gtx (the T-34 of GPUs) but it killed airflow and barely fit. The final straw was when I decided to emulate PS2 games (gauntlet legends to make sure I head enough overhead) on the home theater. The CPU was ok. but the 5450 wasnt no matter what I tried. Plus is really started to cook. So I tried doing with the Intel HD graphics. The emulation literally played in slow motion to include the music. So I was stuck.
So I bought an A4 4000 and a zalman copper cooler (CPNS 7000 I think). Now there is no fan noise. Period. My WD eco greens are louder. Everything runs cooler and airflow is awesome (still angry the copper HS isnt really copper though). The CPU @ 3.2ghz is about equal to the celeron @2.4 ghz (sad really) but the 7480d smokes all my other solutions. So now I have everything I wanted (cheap, cool, quiet).
These AMD CPUs expand possibilities. Not saying I am a fanboi either (i5 4670, i5 2500k, E8400, G530, i3 ULV in a notebook). But this one AMD APU saved my bacon. About $130 or so for APU, Mobo and Zalman cooler.
APUs are still nowhere near viable for their price/performance.
For the same price as the A10-7800, you can buy a 750k Athlon or Pentium G3258 and pair it with a 7750 (or similar) for FAR superior gaming performance. The gap in price/performance only widens if you compare to the 7850k.
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edlee - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Nice review, but if I had a budget gaming machine, I would buy an inexpensive i5 with a better gpuRais93 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
You do not understand what budget or inexpensive mean. An i5 complete platform costs few more than an a10 system, but for many people few dollars mattersnathanddrews - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
AMD A10-7850K - $170Decent FM2+ A88X mobo - $70 ($40-100)
Total base cost $240
Intel i5-4590S - $170
Decent 1150 H87 mobo - $70 ($30-400)
Total base cost $240
Add any identical dGPU, RAM, HDD/SSD, case, PSU, OS and the Intel system will dominate in every scenario for the same price.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1200?vs=119...
If no dGPU is allowed, then the AMD wins (in games and OCL/HSA only)... but would you seriously NEVER add a dGPU, even a year or two later? The moment that you do, you've essentially wasted your money on AMD. That's why the budget argument never makes much sense to me. You'll spend more over time buying ineffective budget rigs than you would if you spent more less often.
Flunk - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
If you're comparing Intel and AMD, as soon as you add the dGPU there is no reason to buy AMD. The CPU portion of the A10 is more comparable to an i3 than an i5 (and much worse single-thread perfomrance), you're paying for the iGPU more than anything.AMD's A-series processors make the most sense in cheap laptops that would never get a dGPU. Half-decent GPU and CPU performance make sense there. But if you're talking desktop, the second you add a GPU the value proposition flies out the window.
silverblue - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
There IS the option of Crossfire with an R7 but you can't rely on it to always boost performance. Still, it's a better proposition than in the past.Samus - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
AMD CPU power efficiency is also a 2.4:1 ratio to Intel.For example, AMD's FX-4350 is the most competitive CPU they have (in price) to an i3-4330. The i3 completely destroys it in most benchmarks, yet it uses 54w and the FX uses 125w.
That's anywhere from $8-$15/year in power usage depending on the workload. Ammortize that over 4-5 years and you may have just spent $50 more in electricity on the AMD CPU. This doesn't account for additional HVAC costs (air condition needs to run more to cool a room with AMD CPU's, increasing energy usage even more)
It's the same fact over and over. AMD is irrelevant because of their dinosaur manufacturing capabilities. They're always 2 generations behind Intel.
Gigaplex - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Your electricity cost calculations assume 100% CPU load 100% of the time. Completely unrealistic.Samus - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Did you really not even read my comment? I clearly stated a range for a users workload. I didn't just give a universal figure.$8-$15 is the range from average workload to 100% workload. And that's assuming you're rate is $0.08/kwh. Parts of the country, such as Socal, are upward of $0.24/kwh. This means, at full load, AMD CPU's would cost about $1.00/day if run at full load 24/7, an extreme scenario, but the point was they use around 2.4x more power.
Unfortunately for AMD, that figure isn't a consistent scale in their favor; AMD CPU's idle at nearly quadruple the power of Intel's because they have no high-K dialetric to completely powergate unutilized sections of a core. All they can do is shut cores off, meaning one full core will always be on.
I was focusing on 100% workload simply because that's the least embarrassing presentation for AMD.
Audiolectric - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Well, different benchmarks taken by computerbase.de show that the 7800 actually idles at lower power consumption than the i3.From my own experience i can verifiy that, but only for mobile CPUs/APUs. I did own a msi gx60 and a gt60, and the gx60 was giving me about 30% more runtime from the battery.
and except for compiling the linux kernel, i couldnt tell any difference in everyday performance. (Of Courage in some games the a10 5750m was limiting performance when the i7 3632qm did not)
silverblue - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Well, one module would still be on, meaning two integer cores still being active. Still, there's nothing stopping a user from undervolting them and making significant power savings.Morawka - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
but as you can see, if you have the Kavari GPU 512 config, it uses 65 watts minimum. That's waaaay to hot for a laptop. AMD makes great integrated gpu's but they produce comparible heat and power to a separate dedicated keplar or maxwell part.AMD is being held back by being reliant on external FAB's. Intel is shrinking every 2 years and has a huge advantage. 14nm baking now, vs 28nm everyone else is on.
Gigaplex - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
That's why you get the mobile variant, not the desktop variant.asimov1979 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Intel i5-4590S is $190 not $170 as you stated.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Core-i5-4590S-Processo...
nathanddrews - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Why people still buy CPUs from Newegg is beyond me.http://www.microcenter.com/product/432162/Core_i5-...
I bought my 3570K from Microcenter for $159.
bebimbap - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Shipping is beyond MicrocenterMorawka - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
and microcenter only has about 12 locations lol. basically you gotta live in a huge city, and the cost of living offsets any discounts you'd get from a cheap cpu.inighthawki - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
There's a Microcenter not too far from where I used to live in Ohio, and it wasn't really what I would consider a large city by any means. It was a pretty standard suburban area. It was about 40 minutes (give or take, I only went a couple times and I never had to drive) from my house, and we lived in pretty much the middle of nowhere.inighthawki - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Actually I just mapped it, it was 30 minutes away.kmmatney - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
OK - if you are using Microcenter, you can buy an AMD A10 7850 + motehrboard for $129, which is no where near the price you above above. This is with a mediocre MB (good enough for most people), but even a better one would only drive the price to $160.HardwareDufus - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I haven't purchased a discrete Graphics Card in over 6 years. I've gone with Intel HD in the original 655K I5 CPU .. and now have HD3000 in my i7-3770k.I will probably buy my very first high end laptop (I always go for middle of the road laptops) with a Broadwell I7 CPU with IGPHD5200 (with the 128MB L4 cache).. With a good fast SSD, I don't imagine I will feel at all comprimised... Day to day use it will feel as quick as all of the super rigs loaded with fans folks are still building.. I don't GAME... so what's the point in a dGPU?
Cerb - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
Graphics, and monitor compatibility, up until Haswell. With Haswell, graphics performance (drawing, photo, video, CAD, etc.). Ivy Bridge's IGP, FI, couldn't keep the res right on my Dell 1080p monitors at work. This is 2014, and I still need a video card just for that? I can't speak to IB, but through SB AutoCAD's graphics would be glitchy with Intel's IGP (parts of a viewport not refreshed, or offset from where it should be), as another example. Haswell seems to have gotten rid of those problems.TiGr1982 - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
Core i7-3770K has HD 4000, not HD 3000 (Core i7-2600K/2700K had HD 3000).Wixman666 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
REAL budget gaming machine? $45 socket 1150 motherboard, $75 Haswell Pentium G3420 dual core CPU, $120 Nvidia 750 Ti... $240 total. Good on CPU, and graphics runs circles around those both for the same price out of the gate. Forget the i5 or A10.tomsworkshop - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Pentium G3420 - 53W TDPGeforce 750 Ti - 60W TDP
Total - 113W TDP
Form Factor - Full ATX / MicroATX
Pros - better CPU single threaded performance
Cons - higher TDP (more power consumption), higher noise level (more fans "CPU + GPU“), more heat, bigger size
A10-7800 - 65W TDP
Total - 65W TDP
Form Factor - MicroATX / Mini-ITX
Pros - lower TDP (less power consumption), lower noise level (less fan needed), lower heat, Small Form Factor, can hybrid crossfire with low profile discrete GPU
Cons - lower CPU single threaded performance
The_Assimilator - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Sure, let's totally ignore the fact that the 750Ti will annihilate the APU in gaming. Or that it's entirely possible to get mITX Intel motherboards.tomsworkshop - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
sure u can find the mini-itx intel motherboard for G3420 + 750 ti, but the high TDP (higher power consumption) still the matter we will care on this days, and the A10-7800 system could fit in the console size thin and slim casing, while the G3420 + 750 Ti system will not.evilsudoer - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
The calculation for power draw should probably take the idle numbers instead of the max. Or you could weight it to assume the cpu/gpu are idle 50-80% of the time.Someone who games 8 hours a day probably will get a discrete graphics card regardless of power costs.
tomsworkshop - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
the owner of the cyber cafe with 50-100 units gaming rig will care for the power cost, if the APU with lower power consumption can handle the games in medium setting at least, they will go for it.Andrew Lin - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link
sorry, but this is actually a really stupid argument.tomsworkshop - Thursday, August 14, 2014 - link
yeah, i agree your argument are stupid, and why did u still leave this stupid comment here ?eanazag - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
A real budget Desktop PC based on AMD for gaming is going to be the A8-7600. The performance numbers are so close and the processor is also ~$100. The pricing on the 7850K doesn't make sense. The 7800 begins to get reasonable. The A88X chipset is a smidge better than the H87 from a feature standpoint. I think the 7850K should be around $145 and the 7800 around $125. Yes, AMD would take a hit on margin, but I think the volume could be better.tomsworkshop - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
the 65W TDP A10-7800 & A8-7600 are good enough for day to day computing + gaming,the intel-i5 may give u 2.5% more performance for the extra 25% cost for day to day computing but not for gaming, u still need to spend more for the dGPU if u wanna games, but that means the cost, TDP, heat & noise and your power bill will be increasing as well.
Andrew Lin - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link
again, i don't actually see what you're trying to say here. the system power usage of almost any intel i3 or i5 are a good amount lower than almost anything AMD has, and that's with far higher performance. the same argument about the dGPU can be made about AMD, but with worth propositions because then you've actually bought an APU for absolutely no reason.Andrew Lin - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link
that should say "worse propositions"tomsworkshop - Thursday, August 14, 2014 - link
again, we use both Intel CPU (without discrete GPU) and AMD APU here, we see no big different on applications which need a lot computing power, maybe a few second faster on the Intel system, but we see a big different for application that need a lot of graphic power, AMD APU shine on that area. the average joe that buy an system for day to day computing like online, office document, video playback, online games don't even need to computing power from the i5/i7, the core 2 duo or even Pentium 4 can be satisfy for them, you've actually bought an i5/i7 for absolutely no reason.tomsworkshop - Thursday, August 14, 2014 - link
because you are too stupid to understand and see the different or you just a plain blind Intel fanboy sheep, we all know that Intel CPU alone had little bit lower TDP than AMD offering, but the integratedGPU on the Intel CPU sucks big times, anyone in the right mind who build Intel system for gaming will sure need a discrete graphic card by geforce or by radeon, than it totally makes the Intel systems TDP far higher than current AMD 45W/65W APU, we already see that the 45W/65W A8-7600 can handle many modern games on medium setting, that pretty amazing for building a cybercafe gaming rigs, the owner with 50-100 units gaming rig build with AMD 45/W/65W APU will make profit and save money from cut down a lot power cost, the single chip AMD APU will also produce less heat than the intel cpu + discrete gpu, less heat in the cybercafe means less air condition needed = less power = cost saving, the single chip AMD APU will also produce less noise than the intel cpu + discrete gpu, less noise in the cybercafe lead to better environment quality for the cybercafe, that's make the big different which the kids like you can even see.max1001 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Why in the world would someone buy an APU to get dGPU?tomsworkshop - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
lower power consumption, less noise and heat, small form factor, console size gaming rig and htpcJon Tseng - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Catch 22:1) AMD kicks ass if you want to game on integrated graphics only.
2) If care about gaming you'd never use integrated graphics only.
Therefore AMD's kickass integrated performance is only available people who don't care about gaming and don't need AMD's kickass integrated performance.
mrcaffeinex - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
I own an A10-7850K and I game on the iGPU exclusively. I primarily play older titles, but the performance is there for what I'm playing: Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, Rage, even a little Battlefield 3 from time to time...1080p on high settings for older titles is not only playable on the iGPU, but gets 60 FPS on some titles. What more do you need for HTPC/light gaming duty?
I picked up the APU/Motherboard as a combo at MicroCenter for about $150 after tax. It fits in my slim HTPC case, runs cool (doesn't need the fan ramped up high enough to make it audible) and does what I need it to do.
The problem is that so many people become so focused on one single performance aspect that they overlook the myriad use-cases for these APUs, of which small-form-factor HTPCs are one. The A10-7800 is running the same iGPU with slightly lower-clocked CPU cores for less money, with a lower TDP, making them viable for even more consumers that do not have the need of a dGPU, but still want to do some casual gaming, which I bet encompasses a lot more people than the typically enthusiast crowd that frequents a site like Anandtech...
medi02 - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
About 40% of Steam users use INTEL'S iGPU.Another huge pack uses outdated GPUs.
Gamers = wasting money on idiotic rip offs like Titan is lame.
DJone - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
1. 65W Kaveri A10-7800 costs $155, 65W Haswell i5-4590S costs $2002. The only proper mobo comparison is A88X vs. Z97 - both are high-end, and in general A88X mobos are cheaper.
3. For the price difference between A10 and i5 you can allways buy more expensive dGPU that will make A10 system faster than i5 system!
Haravikk - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link
I'm not sure I agree about the sentiment of wasting money on an integrated GPU if you get discrete graphics a year or two later. While it might be true today, the benchmarks including OpenCL performance show just how powerful a good APU can actually be, meaning it's an ideal physics accelerator even if you're using discrete graphics for pushing pixels. The issue really is whether games are going to take advantage of it, but I'm really hoping it will become a trend; it's certainly an area where AMD could really do with pushing some kind of physics on OpenCL library, as it's a prime candidate for an APU, even in a system with discrete graphics.But if you're looking for a properly budget system then an AMD APU is absolutely the best option IMO. Personally I wouldn't suggest the A10's for that though, but comparable A8's (are those out yet?) as they are far more cost effective, you could even get your system below $200 and still play a lot of games on good settings.
IUU - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
" but would you seriously NEVER add a dGPU, even a year or two later?"No, I wouldn't. If I was so restricted that I couldn't buy a decent lowly dgpu... and would keep things simple , probably with lower power consumption too.
But this scenario is not valid even in developing countries, the exception being some really bad places where people actually starve. But these people, exactly because of their situation don't have any chance in computing.
So, AMD is in a really bad situation, but I don't believe for a moment that is actually a lack of talent responsible for this. What I am really afraid of , is maybe we have reached a kind of dead end(maybe temporary it doesn't matter). So, tech companies don't offer novelties, because they simply can't have any, or they are too few to waste hastily. Perhaps the new paradigm is not close and people in tech are panicking.. perhaps.
Drumsticks - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
The lowest priced i5 is $40 more than this, with only a 3 Ghz/3.2Ghz turbo. Then you consider needing to spend at least $100 to get good GPU performance, and +~$150 is not exactly in the same price bracket when we're talking about budget.Guspaz - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
The A10-7800 is slower than a dual-core i3-4330, and is only $38 cheaper than either the quad core 3.2GHz/3.6GHz i5-3470, or the quad core 3.2GHz i5-4460...For that extra 25% cost, the i5 will give you at least double the performance...
duploxxx - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
OMG. did you ever had a reality check? double performance? daily usecase there are 2 things slowing down a system:the choice of HDD vs SDD
the stupid windows OS.
All the rest is unreal theoretical benchmarking from review sites. the problem is as you and many more show every day, they actually believe theoretical benchmarking as true real performance.
poor it consumers....
Guspaz - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
So go put an SSD in your Pentium Pro. Double the CPU performance for 25% more cost and less power consumption is a fantastic proposition for me.kmmatney - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Double performance for what? I upgraded a while back from a Phenom II to a Core i5, and I have to admit the performance difference was minimal, as far as I could tell. going to an SSD is what really made things faster,and games are limited by my graphics card. For anyone using integrated for occasional gaming, AMD is a much better choice.You can make an argument that AMD is a good choice for a gaming rig, since you can save so much on the processor + MB that you can get a better graphics card. For example, if you buy the 3.9 Ghz quad-core A8 6600K + motherboard for $100, you have $200 left to buy a graphics card - given a $300 budget.
Guspaz - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
This is true. AMD's processors generally offer good value, but terrible power efficiency... and they're often in the position where they've got the lowest absolute cost, but not the best performance-per-dollar.tomsworkshop - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
the 25% extra cost u paid only give u 2.5% performance increase in realityGuspaz - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Depends on what you're doing. Want to encode a video? Then the 25% extra cost will cut render times in half (or better).bigboxes - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
Seriously, WTF? People that are encoding are not going to buy an APU. Stop with the fanboi nonsense. I have a quad core i7 processor in my main rig. I do whatever I want. However, I don't give a crap about gaming so I just have an $200 card just so I could do whatever I wanted without the machine hiccuping.My wife doesn't encode, game, video edit or just about anything cpu intensive. So I got her an AMD APU recently after Athlon 64 X2 finally crapped out. Paired with a SSD and 8gb of ram it flies for her all important tasks of surfing the internet, typing Word documents, streaming Hulu/YouTube videos and the occasional online survey. Tell me why she needs a Pentium/i3/i5 or whatever super premium cpu you nerds can come up with? Tell me how she would even notice the difference? She doesn't even know what WinRAR is let alone understand how she could save a couple of seconds in packing/unpacking such a file. Yeah, it could be such a bitchin' machine if only... duh. All I care about is reliable and quick for her purposes. She'll be able to do anything she wants to do and it will breeze through any of those tasks. We had the internet go down yesterday and she couldn't figure out how to unplug the cable modem for the Time Warner rep and you're worried that she will take too long to convert her videos? Face it. She waits for me to come home and do it all for her. Of course, she sounds like a techie when it comes to her mother. Yeah, there's no place for an AMD apu. </sarcasm>
Guspaz - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
Wowzers, you're really missing the point. You think people don't need the cost/performance of the i5, which offers 100%+ more performance for 25% more money? Fine, that's a perfectly valid argument.Except the i3-4330 included in this very review was significantly faster than the a10-7800, used less power... and costs at least $15 less.
In terms of accusing me of "fanboi nonsense", I've owned multiple AMD processors, and multiple AMD GPUs, stretching all the way back to the K6-2. But their current CPU product lineup is simply not competitive, except possibly at the very low end... and the a10-7800 is *NOT* at the very low end. It gets outperformed by cheaper and cooler Intel processors.
bigboxes - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
I forgot she checks her email too. She desperately needs more processing power. :eyeroll: I think I'll stick with the superior on board video. Thanks.Andrew Lin - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link
sounds to me like she doesn't even need the integrated GPU either. the integrated graphics of and core i3 sound more than suited to what you're wife is doing, from the sound of it. so what is she using the "superior on board video" of the more power hungry amd apu for again?bigboxes - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link
Look, I buy Intel chips for my high end rig. I use the horsepower. The price difference is negligible between the competing processors. The power usage doesn't matter to me in the slightest. To me the Kaveri will be sipping on the juice. I keep my boxes on 24/7 and I just don't have that high of an electrical bill. I only have my wife turn off her pc at night because of the fan controller's bright blue lights (her pc in in our bedroom). My wife likes to stream shows from the computer to an HD television while surfing the net on her monitor. I figure the extra headroom on the AMD APU would drive that without issue. Whatever the case, I just don't think the purchase is a waste like many are making it out to be.eanazag - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Where's the 45W performance numbers?Where's the power consumption numbers in 65W and 45W?
How well does it work in the low power mode? Is there not speculation that it took so long because there were issues with the product?
What are the clocks in 45W mode?
Most of the commenters below are remarking about dGPUs, Crossfire, and budget PCs.
johnny_boy - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Check out Anand's review. You want someone to reproduce it in full here in the comments?johnny_boy - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
The price difference is significant. If you add a "decent" GPU then plan to spend around $200-300 more (including taxes) than the AMD system. That covers the costier i5 and a half-decent GPU like an R9 270.r3loaded - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Conclusion: Unless you absolutely need fast, integrated graphics, a cheap Haswell will stick kick AMD's ass.Creig - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
What Haswell system will keep up with Kaveri at the same price point?Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
A10-7800 - $150FM2+ - $50 (maybe a Hudson D2 if you're lucky)
G3220 - $60
LGA1150 H87 mATX - $42
R7 260X - $100
Sorry, that won't "keep up" with Kaveri - it will WRECK it.
Flunk - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
You're right, blowhard. It would crush it, except in CPU multithreaded benchmarks... But who cares about that?The funniest thing about this build is that AMD products still soak up the majority of the budget.
silverblue - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
There are some instances that having a 2C/2T CPU will begin to make less and less sense as time goes on; for example, BF4 performance is reduced compared to the i3s and especially so compared to the i5s/i7s, but whilst this may become more and more common as time goes on with newer engines, there's still plenty of titles that a Pentium will shine in. However, will the frame latencies be acceptable? The following article does pose some interesting questions...http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2...
FriendlyUser - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I think you are right. The 4-core processors are way more future-proof. Single-thread performance has been very important but has also stagnated. Plus, we all know that the consoles are multi-core machines and game programmers will have to work with well-threaded engines.silverblue - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
It's one of those situations where the more threaded an engine becomes, the more Kaveri should outperform Piledriver due to not having the decoder switching between threads all the time. Piledriver's saving grace is clock speeds, but if AMD was to be able to release a Kaveri refresh, I'm sure they'd have mastered the 28nm process by then and be able to get a bit more speed out for the same power.Computer Bottleneck - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I liked article a lot. The author makes a good point about cpu to gpu balance.Therefore, if frame time variance will be examined in the future with 2C/2T processors I would hope appropriately sized discrete cards would be used. Maybe R7 260X or smaller (at suitably low resolution and detail settings) is a good starting point for testing 2C/2T processors in the future?
kmmatney - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
If you lower the budget (take out the graphics card) you can get an A8 6600K + MB for $99.99 at Microcenter. For light gaming this will way outperform the Intel solution with IGP, anf be plenty good enough for all other uses.kmmatney - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I'll admit - if you don't have a local Microcenter near you (I have one in Denver) then it's harder to go AMD.bsim500 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Precisely. vs an i3-4330, an A10 7800 = 20% higher TDP + 10-20% lower performance even in quad-core optimised apps (Handbrake, etc) and up to 47% slower per core. It's better at games, assuming you "enjoy" playing PC games like it's still 1997 (1280 x 1024 5:4 aspect ratio + low quality textures + no-AA), which is about as useful as those old THG's benchmarks testing every game at 640x480 to "prove a point". The number of gamers looking to buy a modern CPU with a 19" 5:4 monitor is "ultra niche" to put it politely (unless that res was chosen precisely because it cannot handle smooth gaming at 1600 x 900 / 1920 x 1080)...Seriously people, if you're playing any modern games, just end the "brave masochism" and buy a 2nd hand budget discrete card. I've saw 4x 7790's going for under $40 on EBay the other day and 1x 7850 for not much more. That small premium is worth it regardless of CPU for a +150-200% boost in fps and the ability to actually play with 21st century resolutions...
Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Both the XB1/PS4 are struggling to get anywhere beyond 792p/900p and 30fps so IMO it's a fair comparison to them.That's about the only space I can see Kaveri making any sense, in the extremely-small-form-factor boxes designed to sit under a TV unobtrusively. Board $75, memory $75, chip $150, HDD $50, case and PSU $50 ... comes out nicely to the $400 mark for a "complete system" (still needs KB/M/OS) that would be able to game about as well as the current-gen consoles and still be a PC when it needs to be.
Though frankly I'd rather the vastly improved performance at the same price point by allowing space for a dGPU and building a 750K or G3220 system with a 260X.
Morawka - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
xbox one and ps4 soc has over double the SP's, Cache, and die size than this part, and much more cores. It can do 1080p just fine, but developers are prioritizing high polygon and high res textures over 60 fps gaming.tomsworkshop - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Unless you absolutely need fast, single threaded CPU performance, the AMD Kaveri APU still offer the most balance computing experience.frozentundra123456 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Would have been nice to have seen gaming results with some of the three games included in the free bundle, as well as some more demanding games. Also no cpu test results from a low end i5, which is only about 30 or 40 dollars more than the A10 and would have made the cpu performance look even worse.Really, unless you are using some application that uses HSA or open CL, or trying to build a SFF gaming box without a discrete card, dont see much place for this processor. The price is also still to high. Should be a 120.00 at the most.
meacupla - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I just checked newegg today, but I haven't seen the A6-7400k being listed, since it's supposed release in feb.Might as well buy a Pentium AE and discreet video card for the asking price of an A10.
Essence_of_War - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Ian,I was surprised that there were no platform power consumption benchmarks, was there a reason for not doing/including those? I'd like to see what kind of real-world power savings you pick up from 95W TDP 7850k -> 65W TDP 7800.
Boogaloo - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Seriously, that's the first thing I looked for. I don't care what the number on the box says as much as the actual consumption.zodiacsoulmate - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Yea me tooalacard - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
If i recall correctly they completely stopped adding power consumption numbers around the time ivy bridge came out, and in every single cpu article a few people ask for them and in every single cpu article those people get totally ignored.My view is someone at intel is putting pressure on anand, and until i will believe it until i hear otherwise.
Ian, time to set the record straight buddy.
DigitalFreak - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I'll take Conspiracy Theories for $100, Alex.Essence_of_War - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Really?Here's the big haswell review:
http://www.anandtech.com/print/7003/the-haswell-re...
Here's the first Kaveri review:
http://www.anandtech.com/print/7677/amd-kaveri-rev...
Here's the Devil's Canyon review:
http://www.anandtech.com/print/8227/devils-canyon-...
There were platform power benches in all of them. Haswell-big has idle/load for a smattering of i5's/i7's, Devil's Canyon had an OC overview of system power consumption. Same with Kaveri.
DanNeely - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Could you add a few low/mid end discrete GPUs that fall into the same performance bucket as Kaveri's IGP for comparison purposes?jaydee - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
The A10-7800 65W looks like a winner in it's market (budget gaming). Unfortunately, that's not a very large market, and if you're looking to upgrade the CPU down the road, you are quite limited.On a side note, it seems odd that 1280x1024 was chosen as the resolution for the gaming benchmarks. It's been probably a decade since the 5:4 aspect ratio monitors have been sold in the mainstream. 1440x900 or 1600x900 would make more sense, with similar total number of pixels.
Essence_of_War - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
This!I'd like to see a move to 1280x720 or 1600x900 for these sort of low-end graphics parts. Most living room TV's are 1920x1080, but depending on your set-up 1280x720 or 1600x900 might still look pretty good.
jabber - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I would have thought 1366x768 should be the minimum benchmark size nowadays.All the others are quite custom and the average Joe won't be using them.
DanNeely - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
1600x900 is the current mid level gfx setting for mobile reviews; 1366x786 is the low end level. don't know why it couldn't be added to IGP benching too. The next time the IGP benchmark process is updated either of them would make more sense as a target. 1600x900 is closer in terms of pixel count; but 1366x768 is probably a more realistic option for most IGP gaming if only a single resolution is tested, since only the highest end IGPs can get FPSes high enough to play at anything higher.Essence_of_War - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
1280x720 is a standard resolution for TVs. For a light gaming HTPC type load, I think that's pretty reasonable to test.Guspaz - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Umm, NewEgg has 146 different monitors with 1280x1024 resolution available. They're definitely still extremely mainstream, and there are only two resolutions that they have more selections for, 1920x1080 and 2560x1440.SparklesP - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Still available if you're looking to buy an older budget monitor or are in the market for refurbished, but they are basically only being made to wholesale to cheap businesses these days.jaydee - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I guess I wouldn't call something "mainstream" just because some vendors have leftover stock at non-competitive prices, but I see we have differing definitions of the word. I also wouldn't consider SCSI HDs to be "mainstream" but Newegg does a considerable stock of those as well.Don't confuse number of choices with actual popularity.
Iketh - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
LOL SCSI LOLOLOLOLODribble - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Not a budget desktop - you'd be much better of with a cheap intel cpu and a discrete gpu. Then you got a great upgrade path to an i5, and better gpu in the future. As for extra cost of gpu, well you can get a second hand one off ebay cheap, or probably scrounge your game loving friends old one and that would still be faster then the A10.Only place these really make sense is a budget laptop, where you can't upgrade anything so need the best balanced solution upfront, but these aren't laptop chips.
Gadgety - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I find that in the games benchmarked the A8-7600 isn't far behind (-2.3%; -5.8%, -8.8% and at most 11%), and sometimes even ahead (+3%) of the A10-7800, at only 2/3 of the cost. Seems to be more of a budget gaming winner, at least in terms of the price/performance ratio.joe0185 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Ian great review. One thing Id like to see on CPU reviews the inclusion of a single highend CPU and a minimum baseline CPU. In this review all the hardware was more or less in the same range so it is hard to get perspective relative to the ultra high end and the very low end. Keep it up man!Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
So can we ACTUALLY buy these low-power APUs now, or is this another paper-launch/vapor-launch?morganf - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Apparently not. At least, I do not see them on newegg at the moment.Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Is there seriously no power consumption tests? wow. And there's no tests to compare kaveri vs a G3258 + a modest discrete card such as a HD7750. wow why even bother with this review, it tells us nothing. Luckily another side was a bit more competent and their data shows a 34 watt increase at the wall vs an 54W TDP i3. Shocking. All that extra power for less performance. I really want to see the data showing a G3258 + discrete outperforming kaveri in Perf/watt. Imagine the horror of spending billions of dollars to purchase a GPU company and spending and years to integrate its IP only to still be worse than your own discrete gpu combined with your competitor's CPU!takeship - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
From other reviews on the web, it looks like the 7800 is good for ~85w under load. Oops. No wonder performance is so close to the 7850k. Of course, maybe we'll get some anandtech numbers using a 1200w "noisy" psu eventually.silverblue - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
It looks as if there needs to be a simple investigation into the clock speed "sweet spot" for Kaveri. There's been the odd article on SA that shows that the top mobile APU usually performs at 2/3 the speed of the top desktop part albeit for about a third of the TDP, so it's worth proving.I did see an article earlier that hinted that the 7800 used a little less power under load at its 65W setting than the earlier 7600... http://hothardware.com/Reviews/AMD-Kaveri-Update-A...
...however, it disagrees with this article... http://www.techspot.com/review/856-amd-a10-7800-ka...
It's almost the same here (7600 wins), but look at the improvement over the previous generations... http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-a10-7800-...
Homeles - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Unfortunately, Ian's been omitting power consumption numbers lately. Wish he weren't :\Stoneburner - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
" News from Intel might change that with Broadwell, as back in May an announcement regarding a socketed, overclockable Iris Pro CPU would be coming to market."That sentence gave me a migraine :(
leopard_jumps - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
price wise is A8 6600KBlack Obsidian - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Kaveri: Fantastic if you absolutely require IGP gaming. Otherwise, humiliated by a $60 Pentium.I'm sure that AMD must have done the research, but I'd be astonished if the intersection of:
1) Willing to buy non-Intel CPU
2) Interested in gaming
3) Unwilling to invest in a dGPU
Is big enough to be profitable.
Or perhaps it's just the least-unprofitable niche that AMD feels it can compete in, having largely ceded the server and high-end desktop markets to Intel, in addition to their questionable mobile story.
I miss the AMD of yore, but buying up ATI seems like a better decision with each increasingly-lackluster CPU release...
ArcticCoder - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
To make matters worse, you can get a G3258 with an Z97 motherboard from Microcenter for $100. (Overclocked mine to 4.3 GHz).meacupla - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
damn, that's a good deal.But the average price for PAE and a Z87/97 mobo is around $160~$180.
Computer Bottleneck - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
See this thread for overclocking on Non-Z motherboards:http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=23899...
silverblue - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I haven't found enough benchmarks to suggest anything about the 7850K vs. the G3258 barring the price differential...bebimbap - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Having bought a i7-920, pentium 3220, i7-3770k, i7 4770k, I can say CPU speed matters way more than iGPU if you are not gaming.General use - internet/email, you may think cpu speed doesn't matter, but it does. You might get your email to open "instantly" instead of waiting 1-2 seconds.
watching videos - "gpu acceration" with a gtx 670 just irritates me as the pixels are all meshed and audio becomes out of sync when you seek through the video. I just use the cpu.
creating videos into 264h content - if you use gpu acceleration, no to encoding runs will produce the same result, in the end, you'll want to use the cpu for consistent results, unless you want to do a quick rip to your ipod, in that case just use quick sync, it's very fast.
file compression/extraction - cpu speed matters here especially compression.
file copy - cpu speed matters. If you ever run a low end cpu and try to copy at 100MB/s you start using a non-significant portion of your cpu.
I've never run into a case outside of gaming where even the GMA 900 with the 915G chipset wasn't good enough, and what ever iGPU intel is using now is much better than that. If you are a "light gamer" and play mostly flash or shockwave, i would say intel igpu is still "good enough." If you are doing "budget" build your monitor would probably be on the "budget" side too, and wouldn't be good enough to display your games at high res or without significant ghosting at high frame rates.
I'm not an intel fan boy or an amd fan boy, I just go with what suits my needs best. In the end, I ALWAYS read what AMD is up to because the one thing I am waiting for is, AMD manages to run all their cpu-floating point operations through their iGPU. THAT would be very interesting. Similar to the FPGA added to the upcoming line of intel XEON processors.
DigitalFreak - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Intel needs competition. Unfortunately, AMD isn't providing it.extremesheep49 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Does the A10-7800 still suffer from the power delivery issue from previous articles? I thought I heard it might be related to the CPU's being from an early batch. Is this now a non-issue?From http://www.anandtech.com/show/7914/msi-a88xme35-re...
"In our recent FM2+ motherboard reviews [1,2], one of the common themes has been the ability of the motherboard power delivery to cope with temperature. When the power delivery is too hot, the system may cease to function or various benchmarks fail. Over-engineering the power delivery to be efficient has benefits, but increases the cost of the product. When I pulled the A88XM-E35 out of the box and saw no heatsink present, I was worried that the same issue would rear its head, and it did. Without additional VRM cooling, the A88XM-E35 caused an instant reboot on some of our more strenuous benchmarks (Agisoft, Handbrake). Therefore it should be noted that the results of this review were taken with an additional fan on the VRM cooling, and users of the A88XM-E35 should bare this in mind."
Also, it would be awesome if you covered Dota 2 for these IGPU's because it is the most popular game in the world. On a A10-5700 at 1920x1200 I need to run almost minimum settings to insure I never go under 10 FPS. I would have expected better from the best IGPU's around.
Tom's hardware covers Dota 2 and it seems like it might be poorly optimized because it's getting half the FPS of the intel card. Not sure. If it is poorly optimized...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-7600p-kaver...
R3MF - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Seconded.extremesheep49 - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
By the way, the min FPS in that Dota 2 performance article seem too high. They may not have had any really big visible fights in that test. Here's how I test Dota 2:0. Enable Fraps benchmarking on F12; record frametimes at least; stop bench after 500 sec or so
1. Dota 2 -> Play -> Create a lobby -> Create Lobby (not local; local is CPU intensive and reduces FPS)
2. Join a slot
3. Edit settings:
- Game mode: all pick
- Check `Enable Cheats`
- Check `Fill empty slots with bots`
4. Start game and choose `Faceless Void` (`Warlock` is another good choice). Both have ults which can slow down a slow computer when the ult happens
5. Use these cheats (hit enter to bring up chat box; type `-gold 100` in chatbox to get 100 gold for example)
- `-lvlup 24` (level yourself up to level 25)
- `-item item_travel_boots`
- `-item item_assault`
- `-item item_refresher`
- `-item item_mjollnir`
- `-item item_butterfly`
- `-item item_bloodstone`
- `-levelbots 24` (level all the bots up to level 25)
- `-givebots item_shivas_guard`
- `-givebots item_bloodstone`
6. Note these cheats:
- `-respawn` to bring yourself back to life
- `-refresh` to give everyone full health, mana, and to remove item cooldowns
6. Start the benchmark
7. Teleport to mid and attack until benchmark ends. Make sure to use `Chronosphere` and `Refresher Orb` so you can place 2 Chronospheres at once. Use `-refresh` to reset cooldowns to continue the attack. Bots will use `Shivas guard` a lot so there's a lot of special effects occurring.
7 - alternate. Using `Warlock` is a little different. You need `Aghanim Sceptor` to get the full effect from his ult.
Note:
On my A10-5700 with graphics maxed at 1920x1200, I will get less than 5 FPS during these fight scenes. These are not infrequent occurrences. These are the most important moments of the fight.
FriendlyUser - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Looks good and the adjustable TDP is a great feature for different applications (NAS or media server etc). It seemed really improbable a little time ago, but we are really approaching playable territory for many modern games without a dGPU. I would really love to see TrueAudio and HSA work in more games and applications...GreenMeters - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Someday, I will be able to read the name of this processor without then spending 10 minutes singing to myself: NANA-NANANANANA-NA-NA-NA, Ka[ta]veri Damacy.This is not that day.
ssj3gohan - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
So... when is this AMD center bullshit going to stop? Because I really can't help thinking anything else than that I'm reading an advert instead of a quality review. I'm seriously avoiding reading any AMD-related Anandtech articles in fear of ending up here.tcube - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Fair enough... now complain the same about intel center and nvidia center... geez you fanboysaustinsguitar - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
amd needs something up there sleves... this is not it. An intel (i7 4500U 15W!)cpu in my laptop out-performs this disgrace.... i miss amd. APU or not, i dont think people care that much about trivial performance like this. it pains me.leopard_jumps - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
it is an ultra low voltage CPU . i7 4700MQ is a great deal but for me i5 3230M + Geforce GT 740M/Radeon 8750M is a good deal . Of course , the more the better .medi02 - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
APU is what it has at the moment. (actually closing TDP gap is a nice step forward)What is it, that I can do with i7, but can't do with A10?
austinsguitar - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
just for shiz and giggles.... how about qualcomm start making desktop grade equipment. they need to! intel now has a total monopoly right now. cmon qualcomm come at me!jamescox - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Enthusiast make cpu performance to be much more important than it actually is. For most everyday use (web surfing, web video, etc) there isn't going to be too much subjective difference between any modern cpus. For gaming, the cpu is also becoming mostly irrelevant. If you play at 1080p or greater with a dedicated gpu, you have to go down to a very low-end cpu before it will make much of any difference. This may change when DX12 comes out, since they are supposed to be making it more multi-threaded. This may favor cpus with 4 or more threads eventually, but one should not buy computer hardware based on "eventually". I wouldn't even bother overclocking a cpu for gaming these days. I would consider water cooled gpus and such for a high-end gaming machine though.AMD is presumable working on stacking memory chips in with their gpus and apus, but this will be a ways off and may be limited to mid-range or higher. Any added step in processing adds the possibility of failure of the final package, which increases cost. It seems like they could achieve near dedicated gpu performance with an integrated memory chip similar to iris pro, but perhaps this is too expensive. It also may cannibalize dedicated gpu market. Intel doesn't have that concern since they have no dedicated gpu market.
I have also wondered why they don't put a gpu-like memory interface on these apus and just solder everything onto the board. This would deliver dGPU like performance and would be great for mobile and SFF; it would be very similar to what is in the PS4. It would have low cpu performance due to power limitations, but not that many applications actually require more cpu performance these days.
AMD has more gpu power available on-die, so they need to add something like Intel's quick sync or other software/hardware features. The APUs should not lose in video encoding and such when they have more processing resources available. Is the OpenCL accelerated version of handbrake available yet? Several of the applications under cpu benchmarks can be gpu accelerated, and several of them that cannot be gpu accelerated are probably not really relevant. Any of these chips are fast enough for web browsing. I am still using an old core2duo laptop for web browsing, and it mostly works fine. The memory size (<4 GB) seems to be more of a limitation than the cpu speed.
MrVeedo - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
these chips serve their purpose in my opinion. amd does seem to get a lot of bashing, some deserved I will admit, but again it all depends on what you will be doing with your pc. if you shop around, you can pick up a nice board and cpu for relatively cheap. my most recent build is focused around the asrock fm2+ itx motherboard and a 7850k. using a fractal node 304 case, I have 6 hard drives and a 250gb msata ssd, along with a xonar stx sound card. my killawatt meter is in front of me and its reading a 44 watt draw while typing this. obviously the drives are asleep at the moment. the cpu is clocked at 4.1, gpu 960, mem speed at 2133. just to give an idea on power consumption.Cerb - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
With HP and Lenovo both using AMD APUs in mainstream notebooks, including HP in their business lines, clearly they are doing something right with the latest APUs, even outside of our bubble (like having good enough real-world performance per dollar and Watt).Cerb - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
I get CPU-limited in games a few years old, don't even have a >=1080p monitor, and AMD doesn't even produce a CPU as fast as mine. "Gaming," is quite varied in terms of performance. AAA shooters, and most games also on consoles, will not need much CPU, because even the latest consoles are running Atom-class CPUs (the prior gen would get laughed at by current Atoms). Games tuned for each platform, or just on PCs, tend to be much more CPU heavy, or at least capable of being so (usually resulting in what amounts to a different game).Cerb - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
Re more processing: they don't have more CPU processing resources than Intel's CPUs. If Handbrake intends to maintain quality over speed, FI, don't expect much gain from any GPU acceleration. GPU accel works well for some video processing, and depending on program used, can make a big difference in speed of editing videos, but not so much encoding. The image viewer is all I saw that definitely should be able to be accelerated by the GPU, though the 3D particle bench might be able to be. The rest are very much cases for CPUs, not at all GPUs. Not that there isn't a lot that can be accelerated, but of the chosen things to test, there's not much there that would be a good case for it.nofumble62 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
AMD finally could produce a credible alternative for Intel Celeron.Cerb - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
That's a bit low. I'd take a Vishera or Kaveri over a Celeron any day, as a current daily user of a Haswell Celeron. If you were used to a 4MB/die or 6MB/die Core 2, or a Phenom II w/ L3, or better, a new brand Celeron would be a palpable step backwards, while most of AMD's APUs are quite capable, and only feel slow when faced with long-running CPU-limited tasks.wintermute000 - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
a.) Lack of power test results is worrying.b.) Why are the gaming benchmarks done @ 1280x1024? Why not do 1368x768 and 1680x1050 and 1920x1080? i.e. the resolutions of most monitors
Aside from that, looks grim for AMD, absolutely no point to these APUs - even if the power usage is indeed efficient, we're looking @ desktop not laptop chips. The only scenario I can see them being useful is in tiny HTPC/mITX builds where you're not using a dGPU. Otherwise as many have commented, a pentium + dGPU will smoke kaveri at not much extra cost. AMD better pray that OpenCL takes off in a big big way.
Personally, I would love a ~50-80 dollar version with just a minimal IGP and ECC support for low power file server / virt platform.... intel cores are expensive :)
Anonymous Blowhard - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
Um, you do know that the G3220 supports ECC RAM, right?wintermute000 - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
not enough cores for a virt platform. I am aware its fine for say freenas.tcube - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
They tested hd resolution as that is a valid scenario for most: play modern or slighly older games on hd maxed out with 30-60 fps or more. This excelent. The simplicity of kaveri the noise level and heat outup are quite ok plus the less hassle with one extra fan for the dgpu. You can even play aaa games of this year on these chips and they are perfectly smooth on hd. Moving to fullhd you will need to tone down the graphics a bit to get smooth frames...Cerb - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2014/07/31/amd-a-...Power usage actually looks quite decent. Nothing that's going to worry Intel, but I can see why HP is willing to put slow ones into new Elitebooks.
Conficio - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
I would like to see a validation of the 45W performance difference claims. Would it be possible to run the same benchmarks in 45W mode?zodiacfml - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
Compelling GPU performance.....yet, I don't game anymore. I hope AMD could catch up with CPU performance, at this rate, the CPU will become the bottleneck for their integrated GPUs.johnny_boy - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
I know DDR3 2400 isn't officially supported but given how cheap CL10 stuff is these days (a few more bucks than 2133) it would be nice to see gaming benchmarks for 2400 too.johnny_boy - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
Given the nearly identical performance of the A8-7600 and its ability to run at 45W TDP and its significantly lower price (over 30 euros here), I see no reason to buy the A10-7800.Valantar - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
Will the benchmark results from this review be added to Bench soon?beck2050 - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
Most applications are not optimized for Open Cl so Intel's solutions are better genererally.Allan_Hundeboll - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link
Like a lot of people these days I'm unemployed and have to save money wherever I can.My overclocked q6600 is fast enough for almost everything except some of the most demanding new games. Here in Denmark electricity is very expensive, so I'm thinking about upgrading to something more efficient, but because my funds are limited I can't replace all my components in one month. After reading about power efficiency and and game performance, a dirt cheap motherboard, 4GB DDR3 and the overclockable pentium anniversary edition seem like the best route. Then I will "recycle" my Nvidia gtx 260 graphics card until I can afford the power efficient gtx 750ti. Of Course 4GB isn't optimal but that's also easy to upgrade later.
I dont like the idea of upgrading my old quad with a dualcore without HT but looking at gaming benchmarks it seem I would need a 6 "core" amd to keep up with that, and that wouldn't be power efficient. The small pentium AE is dirt cheap and with a intel socket 1150 based motherboard I can upgrade the CPU to a i5 when games start to require 4 cores. Hopefully I can get a new i5 cheap in a year or so...
But I do fear that AMD can't survive because they seem so far behind intel. This is really sad because I do remember intels pricing before AMD "conroed" the cpu war with the mighty Athlon.
So please support AMD a bye their products, sadly I can't afford to do so!
vision33r - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link
This APU seems like 6-7 yrs late. I don't think it's competitive at all and even Intel's newly released SOC meant for mobile will catch and beat AMD APU in less than 2 years. They need to get their chip design competitive fast or soon ARM SOCs will take over the low price desktop market. I think Chromebooks are already outselling AMD notebooks.rooh - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link
Good review. I'll buy a laptop with that APU or any with quad-core @2.5GHz or higherSince they play good 1280 * 1024 with lot of total pixels compared to 1366 * 768
They are way 2 good for games at 1366 * 768 resolution as most laptop with them are at that resolution.
2 months from now I will grab mine
Wowhw - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link
Most of You need to move to an area where electricity costs 0/per kWh.Seriously. Compaling over TDP was fun maybe a couple of years ago, now it's just old. Want low TDP? Get an ARM based laptop like the chromebook.
briansmccrary - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link
goodPhartindust - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
Glad to see AMD working on getting TDP down, and it appears it didn't cost them much in performance to cut it by almost third. Perhaps there is something to be said for allowing a node/arch to mature instead racing to the next?Nepos480 - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
Lots of people here saying there is no sense behind the AMD solution and there is. Clearly. The only problem is that its really niche. My dilemma: I want a quiet HTPC. I need it to be cool running as well because it will be on most of the time as my file server. It needs to be cheap. It also needs to be flexible. My original solution was a celeron g530 (stock cooler), Radeon 5450 (passive), 4GB RAM, and a ton of HHDs. Case was roughly 3U. 2x 120mm fans intake/exhaust. To be honest it wasnt bad. And it was cheap. The whole damned thing. But I quickly lost flexibility. No issues with the CPU. At 2.4 ghz It felt just as snappy as my 2500k in XBMC. But the passive GPU idled at around 122 and coasted at 135. In turn it caused my chipset to heat up. I know these temps dont scare most but I like peace of mind. So I thought about adding a cheap discrete GPU but the smallish enclosure and cheap card would lead to too much fan noise. i could recycle my 260gtx (the T-34 of GPUs) but it killed airflow and barely fit. The final straw was when I decided to emulate PS2 games (gauntlet legends to make sure I head enough overhead) on the home theater. The CPU was ok. but the 5450 wasnt no matter what I tried. Plus is really started to cook. So I tried doing with the Intel HD graphics. The emulation literally played in slow motion to include the music. So I was stuck.So I bought an A4 4000 and a zalman copper cooler (CPNS 7000 I think). Now there is no fan noise. Period. My WD eco greens are louder. Everything runs cooler and airflow is awesome (still angry the copper HS isnt really copper though). The CPU @ 3.2ghz is about equal to the celeron @2.4 ghz (sad really) but the 7480d smokes all my other solutions. So now I have everything I wanted (cheap, cool, quiet).
These AMD CPUs expand possibilities. Not saying I am a fanboi either (i5 4670, i5 2500k, E8400, G530, i3 ULV in a notebook). But this one AMD APU saved my bacon. About $130 or so for APU, Mobo and Zalman cooler.
HiTechObsessed - Monday, August 11, 2014 - link
APUs are still nowhere near viable for their price/performance.For the same price as the A10-7800, you can buy a 750k Athlon or Pentium G3258 and pair it with a 7750 (or similar) for FAR superior gaming performance. The gap in price/performance only widens if you compare to the 7850k.
Tl;dr APUs are pointless still.