AMD A10-7890K APU Review

[ET3D]

Looks like a minor boost over 7870K for a lot of money.

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

Especially for the 720p guys a brandnew benchmark
(from me and the German site)

Danke FormatC.

 

[Atom Symbol]

This is quality-wise one of the worst CPU reviews on tomshardware.com.

Clearly, if you can prove AMD A10-7890K APUs to be limited to 3GHz in at least one workload scenario where the CPU governor is set to "maximum performance" - which is given the quality of the article highly unlikely - you should take AMD to the court.

 

[razor512]

Complete waste, espe4cially with the zen CPUs coming out near the end of the year. Someone looking for a budget build now, will likely want to spend as little as possible.
They will buy older stock of the Phenom II CPUs which offer a higher IPC, and can fairly easily be overclocked to around 4-4.2 GHz.

To match the same single threaded cinebench scores, a bulldozer based FX core needs about a 500MHz clock speed bump over the Phenom II.

A user is better off building an older gen system for far less (that will easily beat the APU), and then put the rest of the money into saving up for the next gen Zen CPUs to come out, which will require moving to DDR 4 and a new socket, thus new CPU, RAM, and motherboard.

 

[logainofhades]

Yea, AMD's slow going is hurting them. They needed Zen at least a year ago.

 

[envy14tpe]

Can we just for once and all say that the AMD APUs are great for 720p gaming and no higher? Yes, there is upgrade path but if you consider that then got i3 or so to start.

 

[Creme]

You say the Athlon and the R7 250 should be the same as the APU, but that would be the case with a DDR3 R7 250, not a GDDR5 one. The APU can't clock past a memory bandwidth limit.

 

[FormatC]

This is quality-wise one of the worst CPU reviews on tomshardware.com.
Clearly, if you can prove AMD A10-7890K APUs to be limited to 3GHz in at least one workload scenario where the CPU governor is set to "maximum performance" - which is given the quality of the article highly unlikely - you should take AMD to the court.

1.) AMD send me this APU and the Mainboard, pre-configured and I used it as AMD it suggested
2.) I talked with the AMD guys about the 3 GHz thing - it's called power control and helps to keep the TDP
3.) Read AMDs patents. If the GPU is used in 3D, the CPU part will be automatically limited, always. The GPU has prio #1.
4.) It is possible to break this barrier with manually changed BIOS settings, but this is more than this cooler will survive.

I measured in worst case above 150 Watts for this APU - too much for the Wraith cooler and at the end totally senseless. So I used it under AMDs guidelines. Not more and not less. Your comment was a little bit too rash.

 

[logainofhades]

So AMD made a space heater of an APU as well, then. Needing the aftermarket cooler, to get the full speed of it, just makes the value even worse, than it already was. You would be better off with an i3 6100, and a 750ti, for a similar cost, as it would be for the APU and a decent cooler.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i3-6100 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor ($112.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Video Card: Zotac GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Video Card ($103.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $216.98
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-03-22 12:33 EDT-0400


vs

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU Cooler: CRYORIG H7 49.0 CFM CPU Cooler ($34.50 @ Newegg)
Other: AMD A10-7890K ($180.00)
Total: $214.50
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-03-22 12:36 EDT-0400

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Not to mention that you can well pair an I3-6100 with a $50 motherboard.

 

[logainofhades]

This is true as well.

 

[FormatC]

Please remember: the review was not about the best bang for the buck, it was an article about AMDs latest APU.
About the sense of this thing and the price tag please read the conclusion. 😉

 

[hurnii]

Interesting that this "new" part was made in mid-December.

Guess AMD's been speed binning them for months.

 

[rush21hit]

It's not a bad chip. Just wrong price for that performance. I take it that $50 gap from 7870K simply because of the Wraith cooler.
But even then, still wrong price.

 

[RedJaron]

Interesting that this "new" part was made in mid-December.

Guess AMD's been speed binning them for months.

Calculate the time it takes after manufacture the chip, then get them to reviewers, time to conduct the review, write it up, post it, then translate it from German to English. Three months is not bad.

 

[Atom Symbol]

This is quality-wise one of the worst CPU reviews on tomshardware.com.
Clearly, if you can prove AMD A10-7890K APUs to be limited to 3GHz in at least one workload scenario where the CPU governor is set to "maximum performance" - which is given the quality of the article highly unlikely - you should take AMD to the court.

1.) AMD send me this APU and the Mainboard, pre-configured and I used it as AMD it suggested
2.) I talked with the AMD guys about the 3 GHz thing - it's called power control and helps to keep the TDP
3.) Read AMDs patents. If the GPU is used in 3D, the CPU part will be automatically limited, always. The GPU has prio #1.
4.) It is possible to break this barrier with manually changed BIOS settings, but this is more than this cooler will survive.

I measured in worst case above 150 Watts for this APU - too much for the Wraith cooler and at the end totally senseless. So I used it under AMDs guidelines. Not more and not less. Your comment was a little bit too rash.

I need to think about it. As far as I know, I never experienced any similar issue with my A10-7850K CPU.

Btw, can the 3 GHz issue on mitigated by setting faster Wraith cooler RPM in BIOS?

 

[TX_Tech]

You compared this chip to the $370 Intel i7-6700k, WHY? Then you compared it to the out of date Haswell i3, WHY?

Give a nice i5-6500 a try with the same HD 530 GPU in it that the i7 has. Heck, the i3-6100 has the same GPU and may well perform nearly as well as the i7 did.

The point of using the i3 instead of i5 was to show that the A10 competes at i3 level. If you want to say...yeah but A10 graphics are better than I'd say take a cheaper 760k and pair it with low end gpu, 250. That'd outperform the A10 as in results above. Also, by using the i7 you can see how the APU compares editing and CAD work...APU is left in i7 dust.

So, I think using the i3 and i7 was sufficient. Keep in mind the more CPUs used the more time it takes to publish, and there are more pressing matters than that.

That misses my point. The i3 is the Haswell chip which has a much slower GPU than the Skylake chips. The HD 530 in the Skylake chips is FINALLY decent. The i7 is complete overkill, and anyone using it for integrated graphics and gaming really has missed the point.

The i3-6100 with HD 530 is an interesting chip and it is what should be compared to this new APU.

 

[TX_Tech]

Not every reviewer has every CPU available all the time.

The i7 shows Intel's best-case IGP performance while the i3 shows where the A10 stands in terms of CPU performance. I'd call those fair enough reference points with the take-away being that if you use an external GPU, the i3 performs about on par on the CPU side but if you want to use the IGP, you are better off with the A10 which performs ~20% better on the IGP side than even Intel's best.

No, but this is Tomshardware, there should be a baseline of chips and benchmarks on file, and frankly if the i3-6100 hasn't been run under these conditions and these games in March 2016, then someone isn't doing their job.

The i7-6700k shows that HD 530 graphics is now darn close to the APU's that AMD makes, but a lot of people will say "sure, but it costs $370, so the AMD chip is better".

Then they'll look at the i3-4160 and say "well the i3 is slow, better not buy that".

It is a subtle way to bias the article in favor of AMD. Put a i3-6100 in there and the speeds will be darn close to the i7 numbers, for LESS money than the AMD chip.

 

[TX_Tech]

This is called "unbiased (representative) sample" and is a method to get the best results with only a few samples to increase the efficiency of a working process.

Except, it isn't...

The article is biased in favor of AMD, you just hid it well (or did it unintentionally).

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-a10-7890k-gaming-performance-benchmark,4491-3.html

Look at Counter Strike: GO, the i7 does 56 fps, the i3 does 39 fps, but that is largely due to the GPU, not the CPU. It makes the i3 look poor compared to AMD and the i7 is a $370 chip which is "expensive" compared to the AMD.

The i3-6100 would likely be in the 50 fps range (or better) and for a $130 chip, compares very well to the A10 7870k in terms of price/performance.

It isn't quite as fast in the GPU department, but fast enough (now, with Skylake), and the CPU side will kick the A10s butt.

 

[RedJaron]

No, but this is Tomshardware, there should be a baseline of chips and benchmarks on file

That isn't how it works. We're not all clustered together in one shared building with identical test beds all sharing a massive review database. Not only that, but not all reviewers use the exact same benching suite because not all applications are fully applicable to the hardware getting reviewed. Further, given the time restraints we have, no hardware is subjected to every single bench test that all the reviewers use. CPUs don't go through every single game that a GPU will be tested against and GPUs aren't put through every number crunching applications CPUs see.

 

[wildfire707]

Personally, I just want to slap around the AMD engineers that have not done a die shrink on their motherboard chip sets in half a decade...14 watts of power consumption from just the chip set? That is terrible.

I have seen many motherboards on AMD systems that have cooked their motherboard chips.

 

[FormatC]

Btw, can the 3 GHz issue on mitigated by setting faster Wraith cooler RPM in BIOS?

This is NOT temperature depended. We discussed it with Sami from AMD. It is very similar to Power Tune for VGA but it combines both things, the CPU and the GPU. It is the same thing with the power limit to keep the TDP.

The article is biased in favor of AMD, you just hid it well (or did it unintentionally).

I read it every time that I'm AMD-Intel-Nvidia-Whatever-biased.

 

[palladin9479]

This is the physics limitation I've spoken about in the past. GPU's and CPU's simply generate too much thermal energy to be put on top of each other without specialized cooling. Separating them into two different locations enables better total cooling by way of larger surface area's to pass air over. Die shrinks can reduce thermal load but separate solutions will always perform better. This is why I feel APU's should be targeted at low power small form factor markets where absolute performance isn't the goal. The 7600/7650 are by far some of the best APU's you can get for the money.

 

[zodiacfml]

LOL at that i3!!

 

[Vincent_13]

I have a question, why did you not overclock the memory? The biggest boosts that APU's get is easily from memory overclocking.