A10-6800K vs A10-7850K?

[Cotton_]

Hi community,

I'm currently building a new mini-itx rig and decided to go with AMD FM2 for my CPU/socket.
Cause their price/performance is more suitable for my needs. (can't afford i7 and barely a good i5 so the A10 seems most suitable with some budget to spare)

Now, i have narrowed it down to 2 CPUs but i can't decide wich one is the best for me.

One is the A10-6800K quad-core with 4.1ghz but older FM2 (atleast this is advertised)

The other is the A10-7850K quad-core with 3.7ghz but newer FM2+

It will be mounted in a Asrock FM2A88X FM2+ Mobo (best i could find in my area for FM2)
And i will be using 8GB of DDR3-1866 CL9 memory.
Either CPU will be cooled by the Corsair H100i (wich i know is overkill but it just looks much better in the case (Corsair Graphite 380T) and i want to keep it with the case when i upgrade, also silence.)
I will be using the internal GPU for now but i will use a dedicated GPU later on when my budget allows it.

So, for now the A10-6800K looks best cause the Ghz is simply higher but because the description on my local website is more than lacking and the 7850K is newer and more expensive i am wondering if there are more differences.
So, wich one should i pick?

 

[coolcole01]

so you cant afford a an i5 but can afford a apu with a 100 cooler. seems backwards but anyway get the 7850k its just a little better but its newer technology makes it worth it.

 

[Cotton_]

so you cant afford a an i5 but can afford a apu with a 100 cooler. seems backwards but anyway get the 7850k its just a little better but its newer technology makes it worth it.

Thx for the reply,

But allow me to explain my decision because it does seem odd the way you put it.

The cheapest i5 i find around my place is about 180euro, wich is a quad-core with 3.2ghz and no hyper-threading.
While i know that intel's architecture does make up for lower clock speeds the 140euro A10-7850K seems like a better all around deal since i can further overclock it to about 4 ghz.

The cooling had to be water cooling because of noise level and also space within the mini-itx case, also for overclocking purposes it seemed like a better choice.
Originally i was going for a H60 but the case is more designed towards a 240mm radiator so i decided to upgrade to an H100i with the 40euro i saved on the CPU.

Hope this makes sense

 

[Cotton_]

I have another question related to this issue.

Wich is the overclocking potential of the Mobo
I will be going with the Asrock FM2A88X FM2+ Mini-itx.
Can anyone tell me how much overclocking this board can handle with either of the CPUs?

 

[coolcole01]

even overclocked to 5ghz the a10 will never match that i5 in gaming ever

 

[madmatt30]

The 7850k has exactly the same CPU cores as the 6800k but clocked at a lower speed as the GPU portion is around 10-15% more powerful than the 6800.
I would imagine this is to keep the chip in line with the 100w tdp of top end fm2/fm2+ chips
If gaming on the igp is important at the moment then the 7850 is the better option.
However I wouldn't expect much in the way of over clocking on that board - there's no vrm cooling & using a water cooler in a mitx case I would imagine any kind of passive airflow would be at a minimum.You may push 4.1/4.2ghz if you're lucky IMO.
The max anyone has pushed these is around 4.7ghz on a better boatd than that & this is disabling the igp & using a dedicated GPU.

 

[mdocod]

The 7850k has exactly the same CPU cores as the 6800k but clocked at a lower speed ...

Steamroller =/= PileDriver.

The 7850K has more front-end execution resources (4x decoder instead of 2) , less instruction penalties (fixed FPU and denormal penalties), the addition of a loop buffer, improved cache latency.. etc.

They are not the same cores, they aren't even on the same silicon. The 6800K is on global foundries SOI 32nm process, the 7850K is on 28nm bulk silicon, same as their GPUs.

The 6800K's GPU is VLIW4, the 7850K is GCN.

The 6800K is a traditional CPU with iGPU. The 7850K and other APUs from the 7000 family are the first to fully realize the HSA/hUMA system design.

These APUs are very different.

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Cotton,

If you're eventually going to use a dGPU anyway, then there's no point in either APU. Skip the H100 and use the difference to buy an i5. The i5 has more than double the execution resources of the 6800K. Clock speed is pretty irrelevant when we're talking about such an enormous discrepancy in intracore parallelism here.

 

[Cotton_]

Thanks for all your answers,

Especially mdocod for a well explained answer on my question.
Though Coolcole basically said the same he didn't mention why they were fundamentally different so i couldn't realy do something with his short answer.

I maybe should have said that this PC is not for gaming.
It's meant as a portable office that can also do presentations and has pretty good performance.
It should also be very silent for that reason hence the water cooler.

I will take your advice to heart and get an i5, though i won't drop the H100i completely, i'll just buy it later, i just love the looks of it (the corsair 380t is transparent on both sides so it does actually matter) and i might want to upgrade to an i7 later next year.
Problem is that i have only a certain budget right now and i NEED a PC before December wich can handle the job.
(Presentations are only 1Q of 2015 so that's why i can afford to lag behind on dGPU)

Thanks for the help!

Edit: Could i also ask for maybe a tip on wich Mobo i should get? Especially one that has no problems with an i7 later or atleast can overclock the i5 i will be getting?
Thx in advance

 

[mdocod]

For presentations I can't come up with any reason why you would want a massive water cooler. They are typically NOSIER than well design heat-pipe coolers because they have pumps which tend to add vibration, and in some cases, make very noticeable buzzing/whirring noises. You'll even hear them tinkling/trickling at times. A heatpipe cooler uses heat (NOISELESS) to "pump" the liquid in a phase change cycle.

It doesn't matter if you use a little $20 HSF with 3x heatpipes and a 90mm fan (like an AR02, TX3, CNPS5X, i11) or a 240mm radiator with 2x120mm fans, any cooling solution you use for an i5 is going to be able to handle it at peak load at the lowest fan speed without overheating.

Consider as a much smarter alternative, a thermalright AXP-100 if you want something "nice," but seriously, any of those simple 90mm heatpipe coolers I listed above would also be near silent running a stock clocked i5.

Furthermore, for "presentation" purposes, I can't quite figure out what you would use a discrete GPU for other than to support connectivity to more displays than is supported by the iGPU. I also can't figure out why you would need to upgrade to an i7 in a year. Build the machine to suit the intended task now, and don't fill it up with frivolous stuff that doesn't do anything for you. You were originally considering an A10, which has about half the compute performance of an i5, and are now talking about needing an i7. That's quite the range of compute performance all covered there (the i7 is more than twice as fast as the A10's in some workloads).

Don't take this the wrong way here, but I feel like you're throwing lawn darts in the air with a blind fold on.

 

[Cotton_]

For presentations I can't come up with any reason why you would want a massive water cooler. They are typically NOSIER than well design heat-pipe coolers because they have pumps which tend to add vibration, and in some cases, make very noticeable buzzing/whirring noises. You'll even hear them tinkling/trickling at times. A heatpipe cooler uses heat (NOISELESS) to "pump" the liquid in a phase change cycle.

It doesn't matter if you use a little $20 HSF with 3x heatpipes and a 90mm fan (like an AR02, TX3, CNPS5X, i11) or a 240mm radiator with 2x120mm fans, any cooling solution you use for an i5 is going to be able to handle it at peak load at the lowest fan speed without overheating.

Consider as a much smarter alternative, a thermalright AXP-100 if you want something "nice," but seriously, any of those simple 90mm heatpipe coolers I listed above would also be near silent running a stock clocked i5.

Furthermore, for "presentation" purposes, I can't quite figure out what you would use a discrete GPU for other than to support connectivity to more displays than is supported by the iGPU. I also can't figure out why you would need to upgrade to an i7 in a year. Build the machine to suit the intended task now, and don't fill it up with frivolous stuff that doesn't do anything for you. You were originally considering an A10, which has about half the compute performance of an i5, and are now talking about needing an i7. That's quite the range of compute performance all covered there (the i7 is more than twice as fast as the A10's in some workloads).

Don't take this the wrong way here, but I feel like you're throwing lawn darts in the air with a blind fold on.

Don't worry, i won't take it the wrong way because you simply can't know what my job will look like in a year.
Because i didn't tell you yet.

At my job we have the option to either use one of the company's PC's for free, wich are very shitty ones, or to buy one ourselves, get a little bonus from the company and then consider it our own.
Problem is that the bonus is minimal, hence the momentary budget and i need one right now.
That is why i wanted an APU cause they were much cheaper than an i5 or i7.
The A10 would've been enough at the moment cause for the next few months it would only need to do general office and paperwork.

Then about 1Q-2Q 2015 it will also be used on locations to give presentations were it indeed will need to run 3 monitors in booths or projectors.

Then later on i wanted to get an i7 to also do the creation, rendering and editing of the presentations myself, because for me that means some more work i can do from home.

Please don't imagine the company i work for as some mega-corporation.
It's a medium sized company with quite some people working for it but they are pretty happy if they can cut the cost of the PC's, cause the average joe doesn't give a damn about taking care of the things if it's not their PC.
Hence the system were you buy your own PC and get a small bonus for it, it's much cheaper for them.

The reason i went with a Mini-ITX case that's easily transportable is also that i have to work both at home, office and location.
And i prefer a desktop over a notebook because of the upgradability.

About the water-cooler, that was a misconception on my part.
I never used a water-cooler before and always thought that the major advantages were more effeciency and more silence with higher purchase cost and energy consumption as drawback.

Thanks again for the help and sorry if i made it sound like i don't know what i'm doing but i always try to keep my messages as short as possible on Tom's Hardware.
Cause the few times i did post a wall-o-txt i didn't receive an answer cause people didn't bother to read it 🙁

 

[mdocod]

Aha 😉 Now we are on the same page...

Haswell iGPU supports 3 monitors as long as one of them is connected via displayport. (if it needs to be adapted to DVI or HDMI, make sure to use an active adapter). Most H97 ITX boards have an HDMI, DVI, and Displayport connection. All 3 of these connections can be adapted to HDMI or DVI connections, whichever suited the requirement (I'm guessing HDMI is the most likely). The MSI H97I AC comes to mind as a nice ITX board. Using something like a GTX750Ti instead would provide a bit more umph in terms of acceleration in workloads that leverage the GPU (some content creation will) and would connect 3 monitors without as much hassle (shouldn't require any active adapters).

A Kavari based APU should actually support up to 4 monitors, but may require using a supporting eyefinity configuration to do so (this is usually not a problem unless you have displays of different resolution). Also, I'm pretty sure you can connect 3 monitors to a Kavari system without the need of any active adapters. In fact, the GA-F2A88XN-WIFI has 1xDVI and 2xHDMI ready to rock. Unfortunately, the ASRock board you were looking at, while it has 2xHDMI, it appears one of them is configured as an input rather than an output.


-----------

In order to keep costs down and to meet all of your goals for the build, you might consider the following:

1. A10-7700K (usually costs a lot less than the 7850K, but is very close in performance)
2. GA-F2A88XN-WIFI motherboard (3 monitor support, done).
3. 2133MT/s 2x8GB memory kit. (since the system uses memory for both VRAM and system RAM, get the fastest supported speed in a dual channel dual rank configuration).
4. Lian Li TU100 or TU200 case (ideal portability, select size depending on the number of hard drives needed.)
5. Silverstone SFX PSU (they have 2 450W models to choose from, both are pretty well made and will be fine for this build).
6. Silverstone AR06

---------

If you want to go "all out"

1. E3-1231V3 (=i7-4770 performance, lower cost, no iGPU)
2. GTX750Ti (4 monitor support, make sure to select one with the connectivity needed)
3. MSI H97I AC
4. 2x8GB 1600MT/s memory kit.
5. (same case/PSU/HSF as listed above).

 

[Cotton_]

Alright, thanks!

That actually did help me out alot.

Sorry for the somewhat late answer, but i work kinda late and i completely forgot about this thread yesterday.