AMD Athlon 860K Black Edition CPU Review

  

Gaming tests

 In our Gaming tests we used Tomb Raider, Hitman Absolution and Sleeping Dogs. We used the same settings we used in our Kaveri Review and, you guess it, the 860K with the R7 250 gives significantly better performance than the 7850K APU in all the games tested.

The AMD A10-7850K APU can be ran hybrid crossfire with a R7 250 GPU in what AMD has called “Dual Graphics” mode, we have shown the Gaming results of that Graphics configuration below. In the 3 games tested only Tomb Raider was able to benefit from the Dual GPU setup, though not considerably. In Sleeping Dogs the dual graphics performance was slightly worse than that of the R7 250 on it own and in Hitman Absolution the performance was worse than the APU by itself and considerably worse than a single R7 250.

It is clear that as a whole the 860K + R7 250 is a better setup than the A10-7850K + R7 250 in dual graphics mode, both from a performance basis and in terms of cost. 

In general the 860K performs better than the 760K while gaming, with the only exception being the 1866MHz Stock 860K test. With the R7 250 in these games and settings we were able to get very playable framerates. Overclocking the 860K and using faster ram do give performance benefits, but we can obviously see below that we are limited much more by the GPU here than the CPU in these tests showing that this CPU is indeed good enough for gaming.