AMD Kaveri A10-7850K & A10-7700K Review

 

 

Introduction

AMD have focused heavily on their lower end market in recent years. Intel has left a large gap in the market for consumers seeking lower end processors for a reasonable price, and AMD has now excelled in that area with its range of APUs.

We first saw the APUs in the form of Llano back in 2011, and at the time we were impressed with just how well the integrated graphics solutions performed. Since then we’ve had Trinity and Richland offerings which we have reviewed previously. These offered impressive performance increases in terms of processing power and also graphics ability. However, despite these chips having far better integrated graphics performance than anything else around at the time, they didn’t fare particularly well against other dedicated graphics cards, even when they were relatively low end inexpensive cards. Because of this we have always felt a little disappointed with the APU range. The premise of offering far superior graphics power compared to other onboard solutions is all well and good, but when it still doesn’t cut minimum playable thresholds for gaming it does leave us in a rather tricky position.

The Richland A10 6800K was the 2013 king of the hill when it came to APUs, and this retailed at around £115. For a similar amount of money you could have bought an Intel Pentium G3220 for £40, and been left with £75 to spend on a dedicated graphics card such as an AMD Radeon 7750 or 7770. Although CPU performance may have been lacking in this case compared to the APU, the graphics performance would have been far better than the onboard solution offered from the APU. So although it was great to see AMD push the limits in terms of the graphical capabilities of onboard solutions, there were probably better options for graphics performance for a gaming system for around the same price.

We’ve now got our hands on the latest range of APUs from AMD; the Kaveri A10 7850K, and the A10-7700K which are based on the latest Steamroller architecture. Like the previous APUs such as the A10-6800K we see a quad core design processor, but this time with an upgraded CPU architecture, and of course an updated integrated GPU.

The A10-7850K is packed with 12 compute cores – 4 in the CPU, and 8 in the GPU. The CPU comes clocked with a turbo of 4.0GHz, and the GPU is clocked at 720MHz. We also find a total of 4MB cache.

The A10-7700K comes with a total 10 compute cores. Like the 7850K, we find 4 in the CPU, but only 6 in the GPU. The 7700K also comes clocked slightly lower than the 7850K with a lower turbo clock of 3.8GHz rather than the 4.0GHz. The GPU itself is clocked the same however at 720MHz, and again there’s 4MB of cache.

We take a look to see how these Kaveri processors stack up against the older models.