Amd A10 7850k 4.0 Ghz Black Edition Boxed Processor

Intel's new 6th-Generation Core "Skylake" processors, including the Core i7-6700K, have been hogging the headlines on the CPU front lately—and with good reason. Both the Core i7 chip and its Core i5-6600K counterpart (which we're also working on reviewing) are powerful parts. And the accompanying Intel Z170 chipset brings interesting features for enthusiasts, like increased PCI Express bandwidth to support fast M.2 solid-state drives (SSDs) and USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports.

But as interesting as it is to test and talk about those high-end features, fast PCI Express x4 SSDs are still out of the price range of most consumers. And at about $250, even the lesser Core i5-6600K Skylake chip is too expensive for most mainstream consumers and gamers to consider—unless they're quite hard-focused on raw CPU performance.

Competing chip maker AMD knows this, of course, which is why the company has been offering up sub-$200 chips in its A Series line for years now. The company calls these parts "accelerated processing units" (APUs), in part, because they focus at least as much on graphics performance as on traditional CPU performance.

Similar Products

Our Experts Have Tested 54 Products in the Components Category This Year

Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. (Read our editorial mission.)

The last high-end APU from AMD we tested was the A10-7850K($350.25 at Amazon Canada). It delivered good graphics performance in our testing for mainstream gamers. But we thought the price was a bit high at launch ($173), considering you could get an Intel Core i3 processor and a modest dedicated graphics card for about the same price that would deliver better CPU and graphics performance together.

Now, AMD is back with the A10-7870K, a chip that, despite its new "Godavari" code name, is architecturally the same as the company's existing Kaveri line, making the "Kaveri Refresh" moniker the company is also using with this part more appropriate. But despite the lack of any new architectural changes, the new A10 sports a modest speed increase over the A10-7850K on the CPU side, which does make a difference in time-consuming processor tasks. And the graphics side of the chip gets a bigger bump, which will make more modern, demanding games playable at higher settings.

But most important, in terms of overall value, AMD has also lowered the entry fee for its high-end APU. Where the A10-7850K entered the market at $173 (and the initial street price hung around $180), the A10-7870K lists at $143.99, and as of this writing (in early October 2015), it was selling for $134.99 on Newegg.com's business site.

At that price, AMD's latest APU, while it isn't all that new, is easier to recommend than its predecessor. For those looking for a build a low-cost system for modest gaming and general-purpose computing, the A10-7870K is a good value. It's also worth considering if you've invested in AMD's APU platform in the past and are looking for a performance boost. AMD says the new chip will work with all existing FM2+ motherboards.

Now, don't get us wrong: Intel definitely has the edge when it comes to CPU performance, but to invest in the company's latest 6th-Generation/Skylake platform, you'll need to buy a new chip, a new motherboard, and likely new RAM, the last because most Z170 boards sport slots for DDR4 memory only. An A Series APU like the A10-7870K could let you get one more go-around from a lot of the hardware you may already have, such as DDR3 RAM and an FM2+ motherboard.

The "Kaveri Refresh"

As we noted up top, the A10-7870K is the first of AMD's "Kaveri Refresh" chips, which sport the same Kaveri architecture as older parts like the A10-7850K and A8-7600. The new parts will sport increased CPU and GPU clock speeds over the existing models, thanks to improved production processes and (in some cases at least) slightly increased voltages.

For the A10-7870K specifically, the CPU base clock gets bumped up to 3.9GHz, up from 3.7GHz on the previous A10-7850K, and the top Turbo Core speed hits 4.2GHz. The graphics-core speed also gets a 20 percent boost, jumping from 720MHz in the previous model to 866MHz here.

Rather than rattle off a full list of the A10-7870K's specs, here's a chart that compares the chip to a couple of older APU models, direct from AMD.

Note that there's another new Kaveri Refresh chip in this chart, the A8-7670K, which currently sells for $90. We haven't reviewed that one. That chip drops two of the A10's eight graphics cores, however. So if gaming is a priority, it's probably worth spending extra for the higher-end A10-7870K model.

It's also worth noting that the new A10-7870K chip sports the same thermal design power (TDP) rating as the previous A10-7850K: 95 watts. It's nice that AMD has been able to increase performance without increasing the rated power/heat output specifications. But Intel's competing Core i3 chips have lower power ratings. The Core i3-4130, which is a dual-core (but quad-threaded) chip, has a TDP of just 54 watts. Even the current-generation Core i5 and i7 Skylake chips, which punch way above the A10 on the CPU side of things (as we'll soon see in testing), have a 91-watt TDP.

Also dominant (on the power-efficiency front, at least) is the 5th-Generation ("Broadwell") Core i7-5775C processor, which features Iris Pro graphics that actually bested the graphics on the A10-7870K on many of our benchmarks, and CPU scores that far outpace the AMD chip as well. It has a TDP of just 65 watts. In other words, AMD still has a long way to go before it's competitive with Intel on desktop-CPU power efficiency.

But that said, the Core i7-5775C, as sweet as it is, is a $380 part; while it beats AMD's A10 on efficiency and performance, it does so at about 2.8 times the price. If you were going to spend that much, you could opt instead for the A10 APU and pair it with a $200 AMD R9 380 dedicated graphics card, which would blow away any integrated graphics, by far—and you'd still have about $50 left over to spend toward a solid-state drive or a game.

As far as features go, there isn't much new to talk about with the A10-7870K. If you're unfamiliar with what AMD's Kaveri chips brought to the table (or you just need a refresher) you should check out our review of the A10-7850K.

The new A10 does usher in one new feature to APUs, however, in the form of Virtual Screen Resolution (VSR). This technology was already present on the company's Radeon Fury line of dedicated graphics cards (for a full list of supported cards, check AMD's site), and it is broadly similar to Nvidia's Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR).

Essentially, Virtual Super Resolution allows the graphics processor to render a game at a higher resolution than your monitor is capable of displaying, and then downsample it in real time to reduce jagged lines and display a higher level of detail than would be possible with your existing hardware.

We've seen first-hand that this kind of feature can make for better image quality, but the differences are generally hard to detect unless you go looking for them (instead of focusing on gameplay). And regardless, this is generally a feature better suited to dedicated graphics that have the pixel-pushing power to render games at or above 1080p with high frame rates. You need to have lots of performance muscle to spare to pull this off at high resolutions, and on-chip graphics aren't terribly known for that.

APUs in general just aren't powerful enough to run demanding modern games at smooth frame rates and resolutions above 1080p. So you won't find much use for VSR with this chip unless you're, say, still using an ancient 1,366x768 monitor and you want to render games at 1080p and downsample them to your screen. A possible scenario, but not a major selling point.

CPU Performance Testing

Before we jump into the A10-7870K's benchmark results, it's worth noting that we did our testing under Windows 8.1 and 16GB of RAM. We plan to shift to our testbeds over to Windows 10 once we start seeing some DirectX 12 games.

The AMD chips were tested with RAM running at 2,133MHz. That's important to note, as we've seen in the last few APU generations, faster-clocked RAM makes a very significant difference in AMD's integrated-graphics performance. We tested the Intel chips with the 16GB of RAM clocked at 1,600MHz or 1,866MHz—whichever was the fastest speed officially supported by that particular chip.

Cinebench R15

In Cinebench R15, an industry-standard benchmark test that taxes all available cores of a processor to measure raw CPU muscle, the A10-7870K stacked up well against AMD's previous A10 chip…

The A10 held a decent edge over the lesser A10-7850K, but it lagged well behind recent Intel Core i5 and i7 chips and older AMD FX models that lack on-chip graphics. This is generally the performance we'd expect, as AMD's APUs have always lagged behind competing Intel models on raw CPU performance. And we've yet to get our mitts on any Intel 6th-Generation desktop Core i3 or Pentium chips, which will be more competitive with the A10-7870K in price.

Note that Intel's roughly $250 Core i5-6600K nearly doubled the A10-7870K's performance here. But the Intel chip also cost about $115 more at this writing, and (as we'll see soon) features substantially weaker integrated graphics.

iTunes 10.6 Conversion Test

We then switched over to our venerable iTunes Conversion Test, using version 10.6 of iTunes. This test taxes only a single CPU core, as much legacy software does.

On this timed test, the A10-7870K again managed to outpace the previous A10, as well as the $200 AMD FX-8370. But all of the Intel chips did much better here. Again, this was expected on this test, as AMD's current processor cores lag far behind Intel's chips in single-threaded performance at similar clock speeds. But again, mind the price differences.

Next up was our very, very well-aged Windows Media Encoder 9 video-conversion test. We continue to use this test and report its results because, like the iTunes test, it gives a window onto performance with legacy software that isn't fully threaded.

Here, we render a standard 3-minute-and-15-second video clip to a DVD-quality format...

Here, the A10-7870K looked particularly poky, only managing to tie its predecessor. Though it did manage to edge past the 250-watt FX-9590 processor and the FX-8370, the current-generation Intel chips did much better, with the Core i7-6700K finishing in about half the time.

Handbrake 0.9.9

These days, our traditional Handbrake test (run under version 0.9.8) now takes less than a minute to complete with high-end chips. (It involves the rendering of a 5-minute video, Pixar's Dug's Special Mission, to an iPhone-friendly format.) So, we've switched to a much more taxing (and time-consuming) 4K video-crunching test.

In this test, we switched to the latest revision of Handbrake (version 0.9.9) and tasked the CPUs to convert a 12-minute-and-14-second 4K .MOV file (the 4K showcase short Tears of Steel) into a 1080p MPEG-4 video…

Here, the A10-7870K managed to shave nearly 7 minutes off the time of its A10-7850K predecessor. But the AMD FX chips did much better thanks to their eight cores. And Intel's Core i7 processors all finished in roughly half the time that the A10-7870K took to transcode our test video.

Photoshop CS6

Next up, in our Photoshop CS6 benchmark, the A10-7870K continued to edge out the previous A10 chip…

Again, Intel's chips did much better here, but the new A10 slid in seven seconds ahead of the A10-7850K it's superseding at the top of the APU stack.

POV Ray 3.7

This was the last of our CPU-centric tests. Using the "All CPUs" setting, we ran the POV Ray benchmark, which challenges all available cores to render a complex photo-realistic image using ray tracing.

Here once again, the A10-7870K managed to slice a handful of seconds off the A10-7850K's time. But the Intel chips finished this test much sooner, with the i7 chips finishing in roughly half the time of the new A10.

It's worth reiterating, however, that the Intel processors in these charts cost between $115 and $245 more than the AMD chip we're looking at here. So these aren't exactly apples-to-apples comparisons. We just haven't had the opportunity to test any similarly priced Intel chips lately, and the ones we've presented results for here are the tops of their respective families, much like the A10-7870K and 7850K are the tops of theirs.

Overall, CPU performance for the A10-7870K is not hitting above its price or weight class. But it is speedier than what we saw from the previous A10 flaghship, and notably so when running time-consuming tasks.

AMD emphasized the graphics-performance advancement on this chip over any CPU boost. And on that front, the "Kaveri Refresh" A10 chip is certainly more impressive. Let's get into that next.

Graphics Performance Testing

You'll notice some changes to the comparison CPUs below in our graphics tests, versus the ones in our preceding CPU Performance section, to reflect current CPUs that have built-in graphics acceleration. (The AMD FX chips from the previous charts lack on-chip graphics, so they are gone.)

3DMark (Fire Strike)

We started out our graphics testing of the A10-7870K's on-chip "R7"-class graphics with the 2013 version of Futuremark's 3DMark, specifically its Fire Strike subtest, which is designed to measure a system's overall graphics capabilities.

In the graphics sub-score, which attempts to isolate graphics abilities from other component differences, the A10-7870K turned the tables from the CPU side of things, and led the pack—if just barely.

The new A10 chip bested the previous A10-7850K by about 15 percent, and managed to just slightly overtake Intel's Broadwell-based, Iris Pro-equipped Core i7-5775C. As we'll see in real-world testing, though, the Iris Pro chip generally has a performance edge, likely due to its 128MB of fast built-in eDRAM and much speedier CPU cores. (Costing almost three times as much helps, too.)

Aliens Vs. Predator

We started off our gaming tests with the aged, though still demanding, DirectX 11 Aliens Vs. Predator benchmark.

The A10-7870K looked quite good here, essentially tying the much pricier Core i7-5775C, edging past the previous A10 APU, and leaving the other Intel chips far behind.

Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs

In more recent titles such as Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs, the A10-7870K was able to easily attain playable frame rates at 1080p, though not at high detail settings.

While the A10-7870K pulled well ahead of its A10 predecessor on these tests, the Core i7-5775C did significantly better—particularly at the lower test resolution. This is likely due to that chip's faster processor portion, combined with its eDRAM-assisted Iris Pro graphics.

Overclocking

Like the rest of AMD's current Kaveri APUs, the A10-7870K is unlocked for easy overclocking. Given that the chip's primary benefit over competing Intel chips is graphics performance, we focused our overclocking testing on that front. Using our Asus A88X-Pro test motherboard and a Thermaltake V14 Pro air cooler, we were able to bump the core speed of the A10-7870K's R7 graphics up from the stock 866MHz to a stable 1,114MHz.

On paper, that's a boost of nearly 30 percent. But graphics-speed boosts rarely translate into 1:1-comparable real-world gains. When overclocked, the R7 graphics delivered promising results in 3DMark, boosting the 3DMark Fire Strike score to 2,059 from a stock score of 1,899. But in real-world testing, the performance boost translated to just one extra frame per second in Tomb Raider on the Ultra setting, running at 1080p. And when we fired up Sleeping Dogs at its Medium setting and 1080p, the performance actually dropped by a half-frame per second.

It's likely that cranking up the on-chip graphics limits the thermal headroom for the CPU cores, resulting in lower CPU clock speeds. This can hurt performance in some games more than others. So, in short, while you can expect some overclocking headroom here, don't expect it to be enough to put the on-chip graphics into a whole other class of performance.

Conclusion

If you can land it at $134.99, AMD's A10-7870K is more appealing as a budget option than its predecessor was when it launched at close to $180. Thanks to substantially increased graphics performance, it's capable of delivering quite good gaming performance for the price.

If gaming at 1080p is your aim, however, be aware that you'll have to dial back settings when playing the newest and most-demanding titles. Those that are more serious about gaming will still want to opt for a dedicated graphics card, however.

For video editing or transcoding, you'll likely want a more powerful processor, as well. You can still do that on the cheap (or at least the-fairly-cheap) by opting for a combination of a recent Intel Core i3 processor and a modest-but-capable video card like Nvidia's GeForce GTX 750 Ti. But those two parts together currently run about $250, or $115 more than you'll pay for AMD's A10-7870K. So, if you're budget-strapped, the A10-7870K delivers a good value if your focus is on gaming.

Plus, with the A10-7870K chip, you can get playable 1080p gaming performance now with some moderation of your in-game settings, and opt to install a dedicated graphics card later to play at 1080p with the settings turned further up. If you do that with a comparatively priced Intel Core i3 chip and its integrated graphics, there's a good chance that without a video card, recent demanding games won't run smoothly at any detail level in 1080p—at least until you drop the resolution to 720p and crank the in-game detail settings way down.

AMD A10-7870K

Cons

The Bottom Line

AMD's latest high-end APU, the A10-7870K, brings an uptick in clock speed and a substantive increase in graphics performance at a lower price, making it a good fit for budget-conscious gamers.

Like What You're Reading?

Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.

This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.

Amd A10 7850k 4.0 Ghz Black Edition Boxed Processor

Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/amd-a10-7870k

Share this post