AMD A10-7870K

A10-7870K - Introduction Very recently we took a look at AMD's latest flagship APU – the A10-7890K - and walked away pretty darn impressed with the value it offered entry level and even mainstream consumers. One thing though that we did not go over in that review is what it has done to the previous flagship A10-7870K. Basically this APU was the top dog and commanded the highest price of any AMD APU, however when the '90K came out its price cut slashed from $150 to $130 (USD) and the '90K took its price point at the $150 mark. What this means is that right now budget minded consumers have the potential to get flagship performance at more mainstream prices. On paper this really does seem like one heck of a deal. After all, the A10-7870K offers the same four CPU processing units as the A10-7890K, and the same eight video processing units… just with slightly slower stock settings on the CPU side of the equation. To be precise the only major difference - besides twenty dollars - the A10-7870K clocks in at 3.9Ghz with a turbo boost of 4.1Ghz with 866Mhz on the 'integrated GPU' whereas the A10-7890K comes out of the box at 4.1Ghz and goes as high as 4.3GHz. Now there is actually one more difference and this is where things do get tricky. You see while the A10-7890K comes with easily the best stock air cooler available from either CPU manufacturer (aka the 'Wraith') the A10-7870K uses a slightly older 125W air cooling solution. AMD states that it is a near silent design but will this make the difference for consumers and make the twenty dollars savings not a real savings after all? Today that is the question we are going to answer as we are going to take a long hard look at this slightly older model and see how it stacks up against both an even more inexpensive APU (A10-7850) and the more expensive A10-7890K and see if this potential killer deal is indeed a real deal… or if skipping the 7870K and going cheaper/more expensive actually makes more sense. A10-7870K - Specifications CLOSER LOOK: A10-7870K As with the A10-7890K review (which you can read here: AMD A10-7890K ) the best place to start is describing exactly what an 'APU' is and how the A10-7870K is designed. Firstly, an APU is an Accelerated Processing Unit and basically is a CPU (Central Processing Unit) with an GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) built right on to the same piece of silicon (aka 'on-die GPU'). However, this does necessarily mean a larger number of pins are required. To be precise AMD's FM+ APU's use a 906 pin design (with the pins being on the APU and not the motherboard's socket) instead of 941 pins AMD's AM3 processors require. Now AMD has been designed APUs for quite some time now and to be precise the A10-7870K is a fifth generation APU (codenamed Godavari) and is the second generation APU to be built using AMD's Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA). As we saw in the A10-7800 review ( AMD A10-7800 ), HSA does make a difference and does allow core components that date back to early 2014 to compete with Intel 2016 designs… and win on the video front and overall value front – while doing a darn decent job on the CPU front as well. So what is a Godavari APU made up of? Basically it is the same as a A10-7850K but at higher clock rates. This means two CPU blocks for a total of four Steamroller based Compute Units running at a maximum speed of 4.1Ghz. For the 'GPU' portion of the core the A10-7870K has eight video Compute Units. These eight graphic Compute Units are based on an R9 2-series design, and run at 866Mhz while still boasting 512 stream processors, 128 Texture Units and all the other sundries that make up a modern AMD 2-series R-7 'GPU'. Also as expected to make all twelve of these Compute Units work together as one cohesive whole AMD's HSA layer resides 'on top' of them. This in turn means the four CPU Compute Units can create and send work directly to the eight video CU's and vice versa (via what AMD calls heterogeneous Queuing, and the industry simply calls Dynamic Parallelism). Better still this cross flow of GPU calling on CPU functions (and vice versa) is all done at the kernel level and does not require OS, API, or even drivers to do so. Instead it is bare-metal crosstalk that is a lot more efficient than a discrete CPU and GPU… or even an older APU's ways of doing things. More importantly is the twelve cores now share the entire RAM amount as one large memory unit instead of dividing it upon POST into two parts… that could not be shared or even 'seen' by the other Compute Unit type. This is called hUMA (heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access) and works darn good and requires a lot less TLC than the old way of dividing and hoping one type does not run out of memory. The works loads are also now equally spread across all the CUs and each CU knows what the others are working on so as to not cause issues with writing to memory sector that another is reading ('Platform Atomics'). Also noteworthy is just as with the A10-7890K, the A10-7870K is a 'black' processor. In layman's terms this means it is an unlocked processor that allows for rather easy overclocking of both the 'CPU' portion and the 'GPU' portion. In testing we easily pushed the four CPU cores to 4.5Ghz and pushed the GPU cores to 1040Mhz. That is damn impressive considering we did all that and still did not hit the 72-degree thermal wall. Needless to say the Near Silent CPU cooling solution may not be quite as good as the 7890K's 'Wraith' but it still is more than capable of cooling this APU even when overclocked. This does make sense as it basically is a Wraith just with a lesser performing fan attached! A10-7870K - Testing Methodology For this review all CPUs were tested at stock 'factory' settings with no overclocking, boosting, or tweaking done to their profile. To ensure consistent results, a fresh installation of Windows 8.1 was installed with latest chipset drivers and accessory hardware drivers (audio, network, GPU) from the manufactures website. The full list of the applications that we utilized in our benchmarking suite: Cinebench R15 3DMark 8 WinRAR x264 HD Benchmark AIDA64 PCMark 8 Sleeping Dogs BioShock Infinite Battliefield 4 Assassins Creed: Black Flag Call of Duty: Ghosts System Components Used: Processors: A10-7800, Intel i3-6100, A10-7890K, Intel i5-6400 CPU Cooler: AMD Wrath CPU cooler, stock Intel cooler, stock AMD cooler Memory: 32GB GSkill TridentX DDR3-2400, 32GB Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4-2400 Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-D3H, ASUS Z170-A Power Supply: EVGA Storage: Crucial MX300 750GB L.E. A10-7870K - Benchmarks CINEBENCH R15 CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. winRAR Benchmark WinRAR is a popular file compression and decompression tool that also happens to be multi-threaded application. While it does have a built in benchmark we have opted to use a custom 3GB test consisting of small, medium, and moderately large files. We then time how long it takes to compress the files into one .rar file with all WinRAR settings left at their defaults. x264 HD Benchmark x264 HD Benchmark is a benchmark that allows you to measure how fast your PC can encode a 1080p video clip into a high quality x264 video file. It allows for an easy comparison because everyone running it will use the same video clip and software. The x264 video encoder has a fairly accurate internal benchmark (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make the x264 HD Benchmark an ideal tool in comparing the video encoding performance of different processors and systems. Adobe Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible! PCMark 8 PCMark 8 is the latest iteration of Futuremark’s system benchmark franchise. It generates an overall score based upon system performance with all components being stressed in one way or another. The result is posted as a generalized score. Overall these numbers are pretty darn good and just underscore how good a value these APU's in general, and the 7870K in specific, really are. Basically this APU costs only ten dollars more than an Intel i3 but has performance that is closer to that of an Intel i5. That is pretty much the epitome of 'value'… and this is just on the CPU side of the equation where Intel are 'known to be' superior. 3DMark Ice Storm Benchmark The latest version of 3DMark from FutureMark includes numerous benchmarks including one they have "Ice Storm" and we have used the 'Extreme' settings. A10-7870K Gaming Benchmarks Sleeping Dogs Gaming Benchmark Sleeping Dogs is an open world action-adventure video game developed by United Front Games in conjunction with Square Enix London Studios and published by Square Enix, released on August 2012. Sleeping Dogs has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are the stock Medium display settings and a resolution of 1920x1080. BioShock Infinite Gaming Benchmark BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter video game developed by Irrational Games, and published by 2K Games released in March 2013. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are Low for quality and a resolution of 1920x1080. Assassins Creed: Black Flag Gaming Benchmark Assassins Creed: BF is an historical action-adventure video game, published by published by Ubisoft and released in October 2013. Like Battlefield 4 this games does not include an in-game benchmark. This makes it perfect for more real world gaming testing. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded a custom run through Havana’s marketplace. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are Medium settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 1920x1080. Call of Duty: Ghosts Gaming Benchmark Call of Duty: Ghosts is a first person shooter video game, published by Activision and released in October 2013. Since it does not include an in-game benchmark, it perfect for more real world gaming testing. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded 90 seconds of the single player ‘Ghost Stories' level, starting as soon as we resume control of Logan back on Earth. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are medium stock settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 1920x1080. Unlike the CPU portion of testing there are no ifs, no ands, and not buts about it this processing unit is superior to anything Intel has to offer in this price range. Even better, from a value point of view, is the A10-7870K's 'GPU' performance is the same as the more expensive A10-7890K. This to us just further reinforces the idea of how good a value this APU really is. A10-7870K - Power, Temperature and Sound System Power Consumption To obtain accurate results we have connected the system to a Power Angle power meter that has in turn been attached to a 1500watt UPS. This ensures only 120volt power is supplied to the PSU and removes an variances that could potential crop up because of brownouts and power spikes. In order to stress the video card we have once again used Unigine’s Valley benchmark and ran it for 20 minutes to determine peak system power consumption. For idle results we have let the system idle at the Windows 8.1 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak idle power consumption. This is one area that Intel is clearly ahead of AMD in; however, in return for more power consumption consumers get access to an integrated GPU that is actually worthy of the name 'Graphics Processing Unit'. Temperature Results For all temperature testing the cards were used in an open test bed environment. Ambient temperature was kept at a constant 20°C (+/- 0.5°C) and if the ambient room temperatures rose above 21°C or dropped below 19°C at any time, all benchmarking was stopped until proper temperatures could normalized. For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 8.1 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak temperature. For Load tests we ran AIDA64 for 20 minutes. While the stock cooler is not as good as the new Wraith it still is more than up to the task. More importantly it is good enough to keep an overlocked A10-7870K below its thermal wall. So overall it is a very decent cooler. Sound Level Test Results While everyone "hears" noise differently there is one easy way to remove all subjectivness and easily compare different fans: use a sound level meter. This way you can easily compare the various fans noise envelopes without us coloring the results and see what fans fit within your personal comfort level. Of course, we will endeavor to try and explain the various results - which are taken at a 15 inch distance from the GPU’s fan(s) - to help you gain an even better understanding of how loud a cooler's stock fan is, but even if you discount our personal opinions, the fact remains numbers don't lie. For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 8.1 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak temperature. For Load tests we ran AIDA64 for 20 minutes. As you can see the 'Near Silent' CPU cooler that ships with the A10-7870K is not as silent a solution as the Wraith. It is however still pretty darn good so choosing the more expensive '90 over the '70 because of the cooler they come with is not as cut and dry as we thought it would be. It really will be up to you to decide if the differences are great enough to justify the increased price. A10-7870K - Summary As you can see the A10-7870K is an incredible value. It offers near i5 CPU performance at near i3 price point and offers 7890K video performance. Closing Statement While there is no denying the A10-7890K and its Wraith CPU cooling solution is the obviously better performer there is indeed a lot to be said for opting there is a lot to be said for saving a few dollars and opting for the A10-7870K over the A10-7890K. As we saw throughout testing both APUs offer similar levels of overclocking potential, have the exact same 'integrated' video performance, and while the Wraith is better the 'Near Silent' CPU cooler is still pretty darn decent. As for the differences at stock settings, i.e. 200Mhz on the four CPU processing units, since both are unlocked 'K' processors that really is not much of a difference to say the least. Of course, for those not interested in doing any overclocking the couple extra bucks may indeed be well worth it, and the same is true of anyone who absolute wants the fastest stock speeds – as the 7890K is binned and guaranteed to hit 4.3Ghz. For everyone else looking for an APU the A10-7870K really is the better value. Though the 7890K is not chopped liver, and AMD's APU line-up really is choke full of value, it's just the 7870K at $130 is simply right there in the sweet spot at optimum value. To be honest this was not all that unexpected as we have always preferred to purchase 'one step down' from any flagship model – be it CPU, GPU, motherboard, etc. – as the flagship model comes with a certain amount of built in status price increase that rarely is worth the added cost. This was true in the 1980s when we first started building systems and to our way of thinking the A10-7870K once again proves our rule of thumb to be generally correct. Of course the fact that this APU was the flagship model up until the release of the 7890K makes this extra delicious to say the least as consumers are getting the best of both worlds: flagship performance without a flagship asking price! Put another way the A10-7870K may not be the most inexpensive, nor the most expensive in AMD's APU line-up but its overall value really is hard to beat. Performance, value, low noise, ease of overclocking, this APU really does have it all… and then some.

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