AMD A10-7800 APU Review: Kaveri Hits the Efficiency Sweet Spot
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FormatC
August 18, 2014 11:56:59 PM
AMD recently introduced another model in its A-series APU family called the A10-7800. While we already know a lot about the Kaveri architecture, this particular chip's power profile makes it more interesting than the performance-oriented incarnations.
AMD A10-7800 APU Review: Kaveri Hits the Efficiency Sweet Spot : Read more
AMD A10-7800 APU Review: Kaveri Hits the Efficiency Sweet Spot : Read more
More about : amd a10 7800 apu review kaveri hits efficiency sweet spot
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Reply to FormatC
blackmagnum
August 19, 2014 12:56:50 AM
tiger15
August 19, 2014 1:49:02 AM
blackmagnum said:
Just to wonder if Microsoft or Sony were to put this chip in their next gaming consoles and give those gamers a fighting chance.Maybe the new consoles lack CPU power (even if they are 8 core, the 1,6Ghz/1,75Ghz cripples them), their GPU part is far more powerful than existing APUs.
PS4's GPU has cores like 7870 and XBOX1 has cores like 7790, in other words more powerful than the 512 core R7 which exists in today's best APU A10-7850K.
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Reply to Memnarchon
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Cryio
August 19, 2014 3:46:13 AM
Wait. You can now CrossFire A10 7850 with GPUs other than the 240 and 250X?
I have a friend with a 7850K and a 260X and he's dying to know if he can CrossFire.
"I see no point in buying a processor that emphasizes on-die graphics and then adding a Radeon R7 265X. Yes, AMD officially recommends it and yes, we tried it out." Can I take this as a yes ?
I have a friend with a 7850K and a 260X and he's dying to know if he can CrossFire.
"I see no point in buying a processor that emphasizes on-die graphics and then adding a Radeon R7 265X. Yes, AMD officially recommends it and yes, we tried it out." Can I take this as a yes ?
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Reply to Cryio
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gadgety
August 19, 2014 4:33:15 AM
The A8-7600 seems to be the effiency sweet spot in the Kaveri line up, specially at 45W. Trying to compare with of the A10-7800 with the A8-7600, although as far as I can tell just about ALL your tests seem to be done at different settings (e.g. BioShock Infinity is run at Medium Quality Presets rather than the lowest settings as in the test of the A10-7800) so the comparison isn't straightforward. A8-7600 is within 91-94% of the A10-7850K. One item which is comparable is video encoding in Handbrake, where the A8-7600 is at 92.8% of the 7850k, whereas the A10-7800 is at 95.7% of the 7850k. Price wise you'd pay a 63% premium for the A10-7800 over the A8-7600 to get an extremely minute performance advantage, around 3% or so.
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Reply to gadgety
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Drejeck
August 19, 2014 4:37:02 AM
Quote:
blackmagnum said:
Just to wonder if Microsoft or Sony were to put this chip in their next gaming consoles and give those gamers a fighting chance.Maybe the new consoles lack CPU power (even if they are 8 core, the 1,6Ghz/1,75Ghz cripples them), their GPU part is far more powerful than existing APUs.
PS4's GPU has cores like 7870 and XBOX1 has cores like 7790, in other words more powerful than the 512 core R7 which exists in today's best APU A10-7850K.
Not accurate.
PS4 GPU is a crippled and downclocked 7850 (disabled cores enhance redundancy and less dead chips)
XB1 GPU is a crippled and downclocked R7 260X (as above) and like the 7790 should have AMD True Audio onboard, but they could have changed that. This actually means that CPU intensive and low resolution games are going to suck because the 8 cores are just Jaguar netbook processors.
The reality is that PS4 is almost cpu limited already and the XB1 is more balanced. Now that we've finished speaking of "sufficient" platforms let's talk about the fact that a CPU from AMD and the word efficient are in the same phrase.
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Reply to Drejeck
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Drejeck said:
Not accurate.
PS4 GPU is a crippled and downclocked 7850 (disabled cores enhance redundancy and less dead chips)
Drejeck said:
XB1 GPU is a crippled and downclocked R7 260X (as above) and like the 7790 should have AMD True Audio onboard, but they could have changed that. This actually means that CPU intensive and low resolution games are going to suck because the 8 cores are just Jaguar netbook processors.The reality is that PS4 is almost cpu limited already and the XB1 is more balanced. Now that we've finished speaking of "sufficient" platforms let's talk about the fact that a CPU from AMD and the word efficient are in the same phrase.
The PS4 will be CPU limited? Since they write the code/API according to a hardware that it will remain the same for like 7-8 years, such thing as CPU limited especially for a console that runs the majority of games at 1080p, does not exist...
ps: I agree with the downclocked part since they need to save as much power as they can...
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Reply to Memnarchon
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blubbey
August 19, 2014 5:24:07 AM
Quote:
Quote:
blackmagnum said:
Just to wonder if Microsoft or Sony were to put this chip in their next gaming consoles and give those gamers a fighting chance.Maybe the new consoles lack CPU power (even if they are 8 core, the 1,6Ghz/1,75Ghz cripples them), their GPU part is far more powerful than existing APUs.
PS4's GPU has cores like 7870 and XBOX1 has cores like 7790, in other words more powerful than the 512 core R7 which exists in today's best APU A10-7850K.
Not accurate.
PS4 GPU is a crippled and downclocked 7850 (disabled cores enhance redundancy and less dead chips)
XB1 GPU is a crippled and downclocked R7 260X (as above) and like the 7790 should have AMD True Audio onboard, but they could have changed that. This actually means that CPU intensive and low resolution games are going to suck because the 8 cores are just Jaguar netbook processors.
The reality is that PS4 is almost cpu limited already and the XB1 is more balanced. Now that we've finished speaking of "sufficient" platforms let's talk about the fact that a CPU from AMD and the word efficient are in the same phrase.
PS4 is 1152:72:32 at 800MHz, 7850 is 1024:64:32@ 900MHz or so (860MHz release?) It is not a "crippled 7850", the 7850 is a crippled pitcairn (20 CUs is the full fat 7870, PS4 has 18, 7850 16 CUs). "CPU limited" is very PC orientated thinking, things like offloading compute to the GPU will help. No, I'm not saying their CPUs are "good" but they will find ways of offloading that work onto the GPU.
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Reply to blubbey
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silverblue
August 19, 2014 5:34:57 AM
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The A8-7600 seems to be the effiency sweet spot in the Kaveri line up, specially at 45W. Trying to compare with of the A10-7800 with the A8-7600, although as far as I can tell just about ALL your tests seem to be done at different settings (e.g. BioShock Infinity is run at Medium Quality Presets rather than the lowest settings as in the test of the A10-7800) so the comparison isn't straightforward. A8-7600 is within 91-94% of the A10-7850K. One item which is comparable is video encoding in Handbrake, where the A8-7600 is at 92.8% of the 7850k, whereas the A10-7800 is at 95.7% of the 7850k. Price wise you'd pay a 63% premium for the A10-7800 over the A8-7600 to get an extremely minute performance advantage, around 3% or so.Yes, but the A8-7600 has a 384-shader GPU. I suppose it depends on whether you want to use the GPU or not.
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Reply to silverblue
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curtisgolen
August 19, 2014 7:54:18 AM
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Reply to curtisgolen
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"I see no point in buying a processor that emphasizes on-die graphics and then adding a Radeon R7 265X. Yes, AMD officially recommends it and yes, we tried it out." Can I take this as a yes ?
This needs to be explained more... There is a lot of people that would love to use a 260x let alone a 265x
Yes chances are you can crossfire them without having a crash or something, but its a terrible idea to do it. Instead of increasing your performance in games, your FPS would drop by more than half and your power consumption would increase greatly. Its never a good idea to crossfire with the integrated graphics, it just doesn't go well.
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Reply to IInuyasha74
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atminside
August 19, 2014 9:30:54 AM
I like that AMD is working hard on getting better at efficiency, but I am really disappointed that AMD has no future plans for a AM3+ or AM4 derivative for high end CPUs. I love my Phoneme X4 955, old that it is, but with Intel being so expensive and that AMD has not delivered a better platform for me to justify an upgrade; i have been stuck with my 790xta-4d4 mobo and 955. Hope AMD will come around make plans for a new high end or performance CPU not just APU.
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Reply to atminside
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LionD
August 19, 2014 10:04:03 AM
LionD
August 19, 2014 10:12:39 AM
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Yes, but the A8-7600 has a 384-shader GPU. I suppose it depends on whether you want to use the GPU or not.
Still, the non-synthetic GPU-related tests (gaming, OpenCL) shows little difference between A10-7800 & A8-7600. In most cases it falls within 10% and NEVER reaches theoretical 25% - even 20.
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Reply to LionD
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falchard
August 19, 2014 10:26:43 AM
AMD will probably go with a new naming convention if it makes a new desktop mobo socket. More than likely, the days of not getting graphics on chip are over. I think AMD is going to always have an APU from this day forward. So it will probably mean you should wait for the next APU architecture and not invest in this one. As we all know these APU are pretty much dual cores with a almost four cores. Most applications will treat them as dual cores. The next APU architecture will be complete cores and more worthwhile to invest in.
The mobo I am looking for next is probably going to be a server based board. When the AMD Socket G34 was released, there were a few desktop variants.
The mobo I am looking for next is probably going to be a server based board. When the AMD Socket G34 was released, there were a few desktop variants.
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Reply to falchard
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smoohta
August 19, 2014 10:28:32 AM
I agree with tiger15 - these power consumption/efficiency graphs are interesting but utterly useless without comparing them to other offerings.
Also, I was wondering whether you could expand on the HSA benchmark- it sounds very interesting but you offer no information on what it actually does (except that it was originally provided by AMD)...
For example- how much data does this benchmark actually use?
Did you try increasing/decreasing the amount of data to see where HSA starts being effective?
Also in HSA- comparing between the processors by percentage seems pretty misleading (and is not the way it is done in other benchmarks)... is it possible to add absolute measurements here?
Also, I was wondering whether you could expand on the HSA benchmark- it sounds very interesting but you offer no information on what it actually does (except that it was originally provided by AMD)...
For example- how much data does this benchmark actually use?
Did you try increasing/decreasing the amount of data to see where HSA starts being effective?
Also in HSA- comparing between the processors by percentage seems pretty misleading (and is not the way it is done in other benchmarks)... is it possible to add absolute measurements here?
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Reply to smoohta
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icemunk
August 19, 2014 10:33:27 AM
This makes me want a little FM2 system even more... just a low power consumption device that can play some pretty decent games and reasonable frames. The biggest downfall for me right now is the lack of cheap FM2 mITX boards available. The cheapest I've saw are sitting in the $130-160 range, which is far too expensive. If I could have a cheap little $50-60 mITX mobo, along with this APU; in a little mini-ITX case at a reasonable price, ($200-300) I would buy one today. I refuse to pay $150 for a mITX board though.
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Reply to icemunk
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curtisgolen
August 19, 2014 10:35:39 AM
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Quote:
"I see no point in buying a processor that emphasizes on-die graphics and then adding a Radeon R7 265X. Yes, AMD officially recommends it and yes, we tried it out." Can I take this as a yes ?
This needs to be explained more... There is a lot of people that would love to use a 260x let alone a 265x
Yes chances are you can crossfire them without having a crash or something, but its a terrible idea to do it. Instead of increasing your performance in games, your FPS would drop by more than half and your power consumption would increase greatly. Its never a good idea to crossfire with the integrated graphics, it just doesn't go well.
hat is not true according to AMD. Could not find it on AMD website but read this. http://wccftech.com/amd-kaveri-dual-graphics-works-ddr3...
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Reply to curtisgolen
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curtisgolen
August 19, 2014 10:37:14 AM
Quote:
Quote:
"I see no point in buying a processor that emphasizes on-die graphics and then adding a Radeon R7 265X. Yes, AMD officially recommends it and yes, we tried it out." Can I take this as a yes ?
This needs to be explained more... There is a lot of people that would love to use a 260x let alone a 265x
Yes chances are you can crossfire them without having a crash or something, but its a terrible idea to do it. Instead of increasing your performance in games, your FPS would drop by more than half and your power consumption would increase greatly. Its never a good idea to crossfire with the integrated graphics, it just doesn't go well.
I would read this for more informaton. http://wccftech.com/amd-kaveri-dual-graphics-works-ddr3...
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Reply to curtisgolen
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curtisgolen
August 19, 2014 10:38:09 AM
red77star
August 19, 2014 11:08:04 AM
curtisgolen said:
Sorry for the multiple posts , there was no indication that they were working. There has been numerous cases of crossfiring between two graphics cards that AMD doesn't out right say you can crossfire. For example, an A10-6800k APU can be crossfired with an AMD 7730, AMD 7750, and AMD 7770. It doesn't say it, but people tried it and it works. That was working between two completely different architectures.
The A10-7850k is GCN architecture just like the GPUs now and I would be surprised that any of the GPUs currently made are incapable of crossfiring with it. AMD just doesn't recommend it or advertise it because the GPU quickly becomes too fast and out runs the iGPU which results in major drops in performance.
So just because a company says you can't do something doesn't mean its true. I guess you also believed 10 years ago that you can't overclock an Intel processor didn't you?
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Reply to IInuyasha74
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wiyosaya
August 19, 2014 11:23:03 AM
ta152h
August 19, 2014 11:29:48 AM
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anyone else notice that Kaveri was within 5% of the ipc of sandy bridge at similar clock speeds...how did we miss this when Kaveri came out?
Because people were smart enough to know what you're saying isn't true.
An i3 has two real cores, so if you want to compare a real Sandy Bridge with a Steamroller (which shares the FPU, but otherwise the cores are 'real'), you'd compare with an i5. Steamroller gets molested, and left to runt off seeking professional help and counseling.
These are very badly designed processors. They have huge GPUs, but not enough memory bandwidth to feed them.
By the way, other sites did test the A8-7600 against the A10-7800, with the latter having better performance in the vast majority of benchmarks. Not by a lot though, in most cases.
But, in one sense the A8-7600 is a more balanced design, since the GPU is smaller and better matches the inferior memory controller on the chip. The bad part is, this is just a castrated part, so the die is still huge and part of it is disabled. AMD would have been better off just making this die, and forgetting about the bigger ones, since they're so bandwidth limited. Doing so would have made the chips significantly less expensive to make.
If they don't improve the lousy memory controller, throwing more transistors into the GPU isn't going to yield the types of results they are looking for. Obviously, the new memory they are looking at will help, but they should also make an effort to improve the terribly inefficient memory controller so it gets somewhere in the neighborhood of where Intel is. Even in the same county. Or state. They're not even in the same planet, which makes you wonder why they don't look at Intel's design more closely. Even several generations units use memory better than AMD's, so they've had time to copy it, or to get ideas how to use it in their crippled chips.
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Reply to ta152h
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Still, the non-synthetic GPU-related tests (gaming, OpenCL) shows little difference between A10-7800 & A8-7600. In most cases it falls within 10% and NEVER reaches theoretical 25% - even 20.That can be explained because of Turbo. Since less shaders mean less heat, turbo stays up longer, I'd say.
--
Why "Made in China", but "Diffused in Germany"? Also, I thought these were made by TSMC, which is Korean? Or GF, but with plants in China? o.O
Cheers!
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Reply to Yuka
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ta152h said:
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anyone else notice that Kaveri was within 5% of the ipc of sandy bridge at similar clock speeds...how did we miss this when Kaveri came out?
Because people were smart enough to know what you're saying isn't true.
An i3 has two real cores, so if you want to compare a real Sandy Bridge with a Steamroller (which shares the FPU, but otherwise the cores are 'real'), you'd compare with an i5. Steamroller gets molested, and left to runt off seeking professional help and counseling.
These are very badly designed processors. They have huge GPUs, but not enough memory bandwidth to feed them.
By the way, other sites did test the A8-7600 against the A10-7800, with the latter having better performance in the vast majority of benchmarks. Not by a lot though, in most cases.
But, in one sense the A8-7600 is a more balanced design, since the GPU is smaller and better matches the inferior memory controller on the chip. The bad part is, this is just a castrated part, so the die is still huge and part of it is disabled. AMD would have been better off just making this die, and forgetting about the bigger ones, since they're so bandwidth limited. Doing so would have made the chips significantly less expensive to make.
If they don't improve the lousy memory controller, throwing more transistors into the GPU isn't going to yield the types of results they are looking for. Obviously, the new memory they are looking at will help, but they should also make an effort to improve the terribly inefficient memory controller so it gets somewhere in the neighborhood of where Intel is. Even in the same county. Or state. They're not even in the same planet, which makes you wonder why they don't look at Intel's design more closely. Even several generations units use memory better than AMD's, so they've had time to copy it, or to get ideas how to use it in their crippled chips.
smart enough? how about you read the article a little closer before you start to toss about insults.
you obviously didn't read the article. in the ONLY single threaded test run, the kaveri was 95% the power of the sandybridge, controlled for the same clock speed. It takes a little math to work out (since they were benched at different speeds) but it works out to the kaveri being just off the pace of a Sandybridge. Of course once he got into the generic synthetics that single core parody vanished which raises questions to his home made benches.
I know I've seen the benches in the past, with kaveri basically being on par with a phenomII in IPC... and a solid 15%-20% slower in single core performance then a sandybridge... so i was a little surprised that the lone -non-synthetic test resulted in such a small performance gap. that's all i was pointing out.
As an aside, these are not poorly designed chips... these are actually rather complex and fairly well designed all things considered. The issue at play is the focus of the design of bulldozer is both inspired and inherently flawed. Bulldozer was designs on a "modular" archetecture, the idea was with the bulldozer design they could custom make cpus to fit specific clients needs cheaper. It worked so well they landed the 2 next gen console, because frankly... it was cheaper and easier for them to individually design a cpu for them then anyone else due to the modular design of bulldozer.
The problem is with modular and flexible design comes trade offs. one of them is they simply can't compete with intel's performance tuned product line... furthermore bulldozer ended up with some crippling internal design faults that prevented it to SCALE up as well as it scaled down in short at lower voltages and lower clocks it's ipc actually is higher then it is at higher voltages and higher clocks... the result it its far more competitive on the low end with intel then it is on the high)
Finally anyone who talks about a bulldozer cored cpu as having "fake" cores needs to check their inter intel fanboy at the door
The engineering definition of a cpu "core" is that a core must have 3 parts
1) instruction control unit
2) instruction execution unit
3) input/ouput unit
AMD's bulldozer family cpu cores have all of these parts; each core module contains 2 separate cores, each one of those cores has their their own scheduler (control unit), 4 execution units, and an I/O unit.
The confusion about the bulldozer architecture, comes from the floating point processor unit. You see up until 2000 or so, no cpu had a floating point processor. In fact computers around 1997 started to include math-coprocessors add on boards to handle the floating point math... around 2000 cpus started to integrate the math coprocessor, called a floating point processor onto the cpu itself. These units basically handle floating point math (calculus) which traditional cpus rather suck at. Now understand, these floating point processors are completely separate units from the cpu core on both an AMD and Intel cpu... in a way they're sorta the progenitor to the whole concept of an APU, as all a gpu really is, is a highly specialized math coprocessor or calculus calculator. AMD chose, with bulldozer, to place 1 256-bit floating point processors on their cpu per core module... that single FPU is naturally a 256-bit unit, but when needed can function like 2 128 bit FPUs, THIS is the part that works like a gimped version of intel's hyperthreading; as in it's a single FPU which can at times, when needed handle 2 instructions at the same time.
The fx cpus ARE by every definition proper 4/6/8 core cpus. They just work a little different with their design then an intel cpu... or even the older retired AMD k10 architecture
**as a disclaimer i quoted the bit at the end from one of my own forum posts in another web forum (overclock.net) posted under the username azanimefan, this was not stolen from another poster, i just didn't feel like typing that all out again**
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Reply to ingtar33
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Ingtar33, did you take into account the turbo speed of the Kaveri chip when doing your calculation to compare it to the Sandy Bridge chip (which doesn't have turbo mode)? Seeing as it's only doing a single threaded task, the 7800 should logically be running at 3.9 GHz, and with that taken into account, the performance is a fair bit away from the Sandy Bridge chip (based on the "wall construction" benchmark used, about 82% of the performance, if my calculations are correct).
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Reply to Damn_Rookie
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Damn_Rookie said:
Ingtar33, did you take into account the turbo speed of the Kaveri chip when doing your calculation to compare it to the Sandy Bridge chip (which doesn't have turbo mode)? Seeing as it's only doing a single threaded task, the 7800 should logically be running at 3.9 GHz, and with that taken into account, the performance is a fair bit away from the Sandy Bridge chip (based on the "wall construction" benchmark used, about 82% of the performance, if my calculations are correct).I was going off the information provided in the article. the author made no mention of turbo modes (the i3 has them too) so i stuck to the specified clock speeds on the benching results. I assumed (granted that can be dangerous) that the author turned off turbo mode for all chips benched in the interest of fairness and accuracy as the turbo mode on the intels and amd chips work differently.
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Reply to ingtar33
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silverblue
August 19, 2014 1:43:29 PM
AMD's cat cores do not utilise a modular architecture. The only thing they have in common is a shared L2, and that's between 2 to 4 cores depending on model. In addition, Jaguar utilises an inclusive cache architecture, as opposed to any CPU AMD has made within the last 15 or so years (exclusive - potentially less cache required but more sensitive to speed and latency).
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Reply to silverblue
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ingtar33 said:
Damn_Rookie said:
Ingtar33, did you take into account the turbo speed of the Kaveri chip when doing your calculation to compare it to the Sandy Bridge chip (which doesn't have turbo mode)? Seeing as it's only doing a single threaded task, the 7800 should logically be running at 3.9 GHz, and with that taken into account, the performance is a fair bit away from the Sandy Bridge chip (based on the "wall construction" benchmark used, about 82% of the performance, if my calculations are correct).I was going off the information provided in the article. the author made no mention of turbo modes (the i3 has them too) so i stuck to the specified clock speeds on the benching results. I assumed (granted that can be dangerous) that the author turned off turbo mode for all chips benched in the interest of fairness and accuracy as the turbo mode on the intels and amd chips work differently.
True, it wasn't specified whether the turbo mode of the APUs were left active, but if they were, and my calculations are correct, the performance would be a lot more in line with the expected 15-20% slower IPC you mentioned and expected. Just to note, I don't believe any i3 has a turbo mode, even in the mobile space (I guess Intel want to keep it as a differentiator between the CPU lines).
If it was working at 3.5 GHz only, with the turbo switched off, it would still only be 91.4% the single threaded performance of the Sandy Bridge, so I don't think it quite approaches the 95% figure you quoted (again, presuming my calculations are correct. Anyone, please feel free to correct me!
).Based on the figures in the "Wall Construction" one thread test.
(100 / 3.5) * 3.1 = 88.57 = the relative performance of the 7800 at 3.1 GHz clock speed
(88.57 / 96.9) * 100 = 91.4% = the single threaded performance of the 7800 expressed as a percentage of the i3-2100 performance.
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Reply to Damn_Rookie
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SPLWF
August 19, 2014 6:17:50 PM
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blackmagnum said:
Just to wonder if Microsoft or Sony were to put this chip in their next gaming consoles and give those gamers a fighting chance.Maybe the new consoles lack CPU power (even if they are 8 core, the 1,6Ghz/1,75Ghz cripples them), their GPU part is far more powerful than existing APUs.
PS4's GPU has cores like 7870 and XBOX1 has cores like 7790, in other words more powerful than the 512 core R7 which exists in today's best APU A10-7850K.
Not accurate.
PS4 GPU is a crippled and downclocked 7850 (disabled cores enhance redundancy and less dead chips)
XB1 GPU is a crippled and downclocked R7 260X (as above) and like the 7790 should have AMD True Audio onboard, but they could have changed that. This actually means that CPU intensive and low resolution games are going to suck because the 8 cores are just Jaguar netbook processors.
The reality is that PS4 is almost cpu limited already and the XB1 is more balanced. Now that we've finished speaking of "sufficient" platforms let's talk about the fact that a CPU from AMD and the word efficient are in the same phrase.
No what YOU say is not true. The PS4's gpu is almost exactly equal to a stock 7870, but the Xbox one is closer to a 7770 GHz in terms of gaming performance than it is a 7790.
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Reply to CaptainTom
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silverblue
August 19, 2014 10:45:39 PM
silverblue said:
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FPUs on CPU die became redundant with AVX.I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Besides which, the AVX implementation on Piledriver is broken (it "worked" on Bulldozer), and fixed again on Steamroller.
Seems to work fine on my piledriver.
~24GFLOPS without AVX enabled.
Spoiler![]()

~50GFLOPS with AVX enabled.
Spoiler![]()

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Reply to damric
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silverblue
August 20, 2014 4:59:18 AM
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silverblue said:
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FPUs on CPU die became redundant with AVX.I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Besides which, the AVX implementation on Piledriver is broken (it "worked" on Bulldozer), and fixed again on Steamroller.
Seems to work fine on my piledriver.
~24GFLOPS without AVX enabled.
Spoiler![]()

~50GFLOPS with AVX enabled.
Spoiler![]()

"Memory writes with the 256-bit AVX registers are exceptionally slow. The measured throughput is 5 - 6 times slower than on the previous model (Bulldozer), and 8 - 9 times slower than two 128-bit writes. No explanation for this has been found. This design flaw is likelty to negate any advantage of using the AVX instruction set." source: http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=285
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Reply to silverblue
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wiyosaya
August 20, 2014 9:51:49 AM
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To ingtar33: Processors with floating-point units came out in 1989, with the Intel 80486. Casey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486
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Reply to wiyosaya
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martel80
August 20, 2014 10:34:23 AM
silverblue said:
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silverblue said:
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FPUs on CPU die became redundant with AVX.I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Besides which, the AVX implementation on Piledriver is broken (it "worked" on Bulldozer), and fixed again on Steamroller.
Seems to work fine on my piledriver.
~24GFLOPS without AVX enabled.
Spoiler![]()

~50GFLOPS with AVX enabled.
Spoiler![]()

"Memory writes with the 256-bit AVX registers are exceptionally slow. The measured throughput is 5 - 6 times slower than on the previous model (Bulldozer), and 8 - 9 times slower than two 128-bit writes. No explanation for this has been found. This design flaw is likelty to negate any advantage of using the AVX instruction set." source: http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=285
Apparantly their hypothesis was just proved wrong.
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Thorfkin
August 20, 2014 1:25:52 PM
Your Kaveri gaming benchmarks seem flawed to me. Kaveri's gaming power comes from it's Direct X 11 render engine. I noticed that all of your benchmarks are run at the lowest setting for the game. I use an A10-7850k and I never play with anything below high detail. Kaveri's power comes from the fact that it can do higher detail without considerable performance loss. I run Skyrim at 1920x1080 at the high detail preset. If it weren't for the fact that I have more than 150 mods installed I could use Ultra detail without missing a beat. Granted I do have my Kaveri heavily overclocked at 4.4ghz. The fact that Kaveri can do this is a huge part of its value proposition.
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I'm properly going to get down rated for this
AMD APUs, while they bring in budget friendly PCs for those on a budget, but stop making them like their actually worth buying, cause it's not. Just look at those gaming benchmarks, in order to make them attractive the games have to run at the lowest settings. Who in the real world runs games at the lowest settings? I know I don't, and I bet none of you here as well. The other is the price, AMD A10-7800 at Newegg cost $169.99, the cheapest Intel Core i5 at Newegg cost $184.99, that is the difference of $15 dollars. If a you were to buy a CPU for yourself you doing to get a AMD 10? I doubt it. If a friend asked you to help them build a gaming computer, you going to recommend a AMD A10 or even think about AMD A10 as your very first CPU pick? The most cheapest CPU would be a AMD FX 6300. Seriously, AMD really need to bring some focus back to their FX line up as many of us would still like to have a proper desktop cpu. and none of these APUs but you can pretend it still a great desktop CPU nonsense.
AMD A10 = those peddle cars that toddler drives around with
AMD FX = a proper car
Links to them APU and CPU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
AMD APUs, while they bring in budget friendly PCs for those on a budget, but stop making them like their actually worth buying, cause it's not. Just look at those gaming benchmarks, in order to make them attractive the games have to run at the lowest settings. Who in the real world runs games at the lowest settings? I know I don't, and I bet none of you here as well. The other is the price, AMD A10-7800 at Newegg cost $169.99, the cheapest Intel Core i5 at Newegg cost $184.99, that is the difference of $15 dollars. If a you were to buy a CPU for yourself you doing to get a AMD 10? I doubt it. If a friend asked you to help them build a gaming computer, you going to recommend a AMD A10 or even think about AMD A10 as your very first CPU pick? The most cheapest CPU would be a AMD FX 6300. Seriously, AMD really need to bring some focus back to their FX line up as many of us would still like to have a proper desktop cpu. and none of these APUs but you can pretend it still a great desktop CPU nonsense.
AMD A10 = those peddle cars that toddler drives around with
AMD FX = a proper car
Links to them APU and CPU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
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alextheblue
August 20, 2014 8:29:50 PM
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I agree with gadgety - the REAL sweet spot is A8-7600. In all test I could found, it shows 90%+ performance of A10-7800 - I mean GPU tests, no mention to CPU. So the ridiculous cost of A10-7800 just has no sense.One problem: The A8-7600 supports configurable TDPs. So when you're looking at benchmarks, keep in mind that they may be running it at 65W. At 45W the 7600 loses a good chunk of performance. With that being said, the reduced power consumption might still make it worthwhile for certain uses. I think it should have been included in the comparison, so long as they tested it at both TDPs. I believe the 7600 would be very competitive on the CPU front, but anything that stressed the GPU heavily would favor the 7800.
Quote:
This makes me want a little FM2 system even more... just a low power consumption device that can play some pretty decent games and reasonable frames. The biggest downfall for me right now is the lack of cheap FM2 mITX boards available. The cheapest I've saw are sitting in the $130-160 range, which is far too expensive. If I could have a cheap little $50-60 mITX mobo, along with this APU; in a little mini-ITX case at a reasonable price, ($200-300) I would buy one today. I refuse to pay $150 for a mITX board though.The mITX boards are overpriced (mATX yields the best prices for FM2+ currently), but not THAT overpriced.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
$96. That's a pretty nice A88X model, too. Again though, I'd like to stress that if you don't need it to be super tiny, micro ATX options are great.
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lp231 said:
I'm properly going to get down rated for thisAMD APUs, while they bring in budget friendly PCs for those on a budget, but stop making them like their actually worth buying, cause it's not. Just look at those gaming benchmarks, in order to make them attractive the games have to run at the lowest settings. Who in the real world runs games at the lowest settings? I know I don't, and I bet none of you here as well. The other is the price, AMD A10-7800 at Newegg cost $169.99, the cheapest Intel Core i5 at Newegg cost $184.99, that is the difference of $15 dollars. If a you were to buy a CPU for yourself you doing to get a AMD 10? I doubt it. If a friend asked you to help them build a gaming computer, you going to recommend a AMD A10 or even think about AMD A10 as your very first CPU pick? The most cheapest CPU would be a AMD FX 6300. Seriously, AMD really need to bring some focus back to their FX line up as many of us would still like to have a proper desktop cpu. and none of these APUs but you can pretend it still a great desktop CPU nonsense.
AMD A10 = those peddle cars that toddler drives around with
AMD FX = a proper car
Links to them APU and CPU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
You are missing the point completely. They don't try to make the CPU seem more powerful than it is, they really just try to point it out to be as fast as you need. The part they really advertise is the GPU side and it is the fastest CPU with built in graphics money can buy. True, an Intel Core i5 isn't much more expensive, but what if someone is buying a gaming PC and doesn't have a lot of cash? To get a solid graphics card they at least need $80 to get a graphics card that can beat the graphics in this GPU. So now they are close to being $100 more expensive, and that is before considering motherboards which are usually a little higher for Intel.
Granted you could get an Intel Core i3 or an FX 6300 CPU which performs better, but that will cost $120, add an $80 GPU to get a better graphics card and you are $40 past this one for little gain in performance. For someone who is very tight on cash that extra $40 is really important.
So stop being so narrow minded and remember not everyone can afford to go out and buy an i7 and a GTX 780 Ti.
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ta152h
August 20, 2014 11:14:51 PM
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ta152h said:
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anyone else notice that Kaveri was within 5% of the ipc of sandy bridge at similar clock speeds...how did we miss this when Kaveri came out?
Because people were smart enough to know what you're saying isn't true.
An i3 has two real cores, so if you want to compare a real Sandy Bridge with a Steamroller (which shares the FPU, but otherwise the cores are 'real'), you'd compare with an i5. Steamroller gets molested, and left to runt off seeking professional help and counseling.
These are very badly designed processors. They have huge GPUs, but not enough memory bandwidth to feed them.
By the way, other sites did test the A8-7600 against the A10-7800, with the latter having better performance in the vast majority of benchmarks. Not by a lot though, in most cases.
But, in one sense the A8-7600 is a more balanced design, since the GPU is smaller and better matches the inferior memory controller on the chip. The bad part is, this is just a castrated part, so the die is still huge and part of it is disabled. AMD would have been better off just making this die, and forgetting about the bigger ones, since they're so bandwidth limited. Doing so would have made the chips significantly less expensive to make.
If they don't improve the lousy memory controller, throwing more transistors into the GPU isn't going to yield the types of results they are looking for. Obviously, the new memory they are looking at will help, but they should also make an effort to improve the terribly inefficient memory controller so it gets somewhere in the neighborhood of where Intel is. Even in the same county. Or state. They're not even in the same planet, which makes you wonder why they don't look at Intel's design more closely. Even several generations units use memory better than AMD's, so they've had time to copy it, or to get ideas how to use it in their crippled chips.
smart enough? how about you read the article a little closer before you start to toss about insults.
you obviously didn't read the article. in the ONLY single threaded test run, the kaveri was 95% the power of the sandybridge, controlled for the same clock speed. It takes a little math to work out (since they were benched at different speeds) but it works out to the kaveri being just off the pace of a Sandybridge. Of course once he got into the generic synthetics that single core parody vanished which raises questions to his home made benches.
I know I've seen the benches in the past, with kaveri basically being on par with a phenomII in IPC... and a solid 15%-20% slower in single core performance then a sandybridge... so i was a little surprised that the lone -non-synthetic test resulted in such a small performance gap. that's all i was pointing out.
As an aside, these are not poorly designed chips... these are actually rather complex and fairly well designed all things considered. The issue at play is the focus of the design of bulldozer is both inspired and inherently flawed. Bulldozer was designs on a "modular" archetecture, the idea was with the bulldozer design they could custom make cpus to fit specific clients needs cheaper. It worked so well they landed the 2 next gen console, because frankly... it was cheaper and easier for them to individually design a cpu for them then anyone else due to the modular design of bulldozer.
The problem is with modular and flexible design comes trade offs. one of them is they simply can't compete with intel's performance tuned product line... furthermore bulldozer ended up with some crippling internal design faults that prevented it to SCALE up as well as it scaled down in short at lower voltages and lower clocks it's ipc actually is higher then it is at higher voltages and higher clocks... the result it its far more competitive on the low end with intel then it is on the high)
Finally anyone who talks about a bulldozer cored cpu as having "fake" cores needs to check their inter intel fanboy at the door
The engineering definition of a cpu "core" is that a core must have 3 parts
1) instruction control unit
2) instruction execution unit
3) input/ouput unit
AMD's bulldozer family cpu cores have all of these parts; each core module contains 2 separate cores, each one of those cores has their their own scheduler (control unit), 4 execution units, and an I/O unit.
The confusion about the bulldozer architecture, comes from the floating point processor unit. You see up until 2000 or so, no cpu had a floating point processor. In fact computers around 1997 started to include math-coprocessors add on boards to handle the floating point math... around 2000 cpus started to integrate the math coprocessor, called a floating point processor onto the cpu itself. These units basically handle floating point math (calculus) which traditional cpus rather suck at. Now understand, these floating point processors are completely separate units from the cpu core on both an AMD and Intel cpu... in a way they're sorta the progenitor to the whole concept of an APU, as all a gpu really is, is a highly specialized math coprocessor or calculus calculator. AMD chose, with bulldozer, to place 1 256-bit floating point processors on their cpu per core module... that single FPU is naturally a 256-bit unit, but when needed can function like 2 128 bit FPUs, THIS is the part that works like a gimped version of intel's hyperthreading; as in it's a single FPU which can at times, when needed handle 2 instructions at the same time.
The fx cpus ARE by every definition proper 4/6/8 core cpus. They just work a little different with their design then an intel cpu... or even the older retired AMD k10 architecture
**as a disclaimer i quoted the bit at the end from one of my own forum posts in another web forum (overclock.net) posted under the username azanimefan, this was not stolen from another poster, i just didn't feel like typing that all out again**
Actually, you know nothing about this subject, so I'll help correct your misinformation.
First, you don't base IPC off of one benchmark. Ever. Sandy Bridge is way ahead of Piledriver in IPC. Virtually all benchmarks show this, but I can show you a benchmark that will show whatever I want.
Second, if you knew ANYTHING about Bulldozer and Piledriver you would know it's not a real core. But, you don't. You want to sound like you do, but you really don't know anything, huh?
Let's go further with this. A core in this processor is not a full core. It shares not only the FPU with another core, but also the decoders! It's also narrower than an Intel core, and AMD's previous generation, but that part would just make it a weaker core, but a real one. The first two, do not.
It's a piece of crap. That's why they lost market share. That's they can not even approximate the performance of an Intel chip of the same size, and they compete against much smaller Intel CPUs. Sure, Intel charges more, but not because they have to, but because they can. On top of this, these slow AMD CPUs take up a lot more energy.
Even AMD is panning these miserable processors. It's a failed design, that is being discontinued after Carrizo. That's not because it's good. It's because it's not. They point out the Kabini does as much work per clock cycle, yet is 1/3 the size. Ouch. That's the maker of the Kaveri saying that. Hurts, huh?
So, let's not be stupid, and try to talk about stuff we don't understand. You may still be in denial, but the company that makes the processor even talks about it in those terms, and has decided to kill the design. The nonsense about the custom designs is pure fabrication (forgive the pun). There are no custom designs for this processor, and there never will be. Jaguar got those. And it's a much better design. Little wonder why it got into the consoles, while the failed Piledriver/Steamroller failed to.
It's not because it was a good design that it failed. It's because it's a failed design.
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HeavenKidz
August 21, 2014 4:35:14 AM
IInuyasha74 said:
lp231 said:
I'm properly going to get down rated for thisAMD APUs, while they bring in budget friendly PCs for those on a budget, but stop making them like their actually worth buying, cause it's not. Just look at those gaming benchmarks, in order to make them attractive the games have to run at the lowest settings. Who in the real world runs games at the lowest settings? I know I don't, and I bet none of you here as well. The other is the price, AMD A10-7800 at Newegg cost $169.99, the cheapest Intel Core i5 at Newegg cost $184.99, that is the difference of $15 dollars. If a you were to buy a CPU for yourself you doing to get a AMD 10? I doubt it. If a friend asked you to help them build a gaming computer, you going to recommend a AMD A10 or even think about AMD A10 as your very first CPU pick? The most cheapest CPU would be a AMD FX 6300. Seriously, AMD really need to bring some focus back to their FX line up as many of us would still like to have a proper desktop cpu. and none of these APUs but you can pretend it still a great desktop CPU nonsense.
AMD A10 = those peddle cars that toddler drives around with
AMD FX = a proper car
Links to them APU and CPU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
You are missing the point completely. They don't try to make the CPU seem more powerful than it is, they really just try to point it out to be as fast as you need. The part they really advertise is the GPU side and it is the fastest CPU with built in graphics money can buy. True, an Intel Core i5 isn't much more expensive, but what if someone is buying a gaming PC and doesn't have a lot of cash? To get a solid graphics card they at least need $80 to get a graphics card that can beat the graphics in this GPU. So now they are close to being $100 more expensive, and that is before considering motherboards which are usually a little higher for Intel.
Granted you could get an Intel Core i3 or an FX 6300 CPU which performs better, but that will cost $120, add an $80 GPU to get a better graphics card and you are $40 past this one for little gain in performance. For someone who is very tight on cash that extra $40 is really important.
So stop being so narrow minded and remember not everyone can afford to go out and buy an i7 and a GTX 780 Ti.
All prices from Newegg
AMD APU
AMD A10-7800.................................$169.99
Team 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 2400.....$75.99
Asus A78M-A...................................$67.79
Total.................................................$313.77
Sapphire R7-260X 2GB..................$119.99
Total with card................................$433.76
Intel Core i5
Intel Core i5 4440............................$184.99
Team 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 2400....$75.99
Asus H81M-D Plus.........................$54.99
Total................................................$315.97
Sapphire R7-260X 2GB.................$119.99
Total with card................................$435.96
In terms of IGP performance in games, the AMD is the clear winner, but the game would either have to run at a the lowest detail as possible or even at a lower resolution like 720P.
Adding a graphic card, then the Core i5 is clearly the better pick because it will dance around that AMD A10-7800. To some Core i5 may be out of their budget, so that is the reason I've mentioned before the cheapest way to go is get a AMD FX 6300.
AMD FX
AMD FX 6300...................................$119.99
Team 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 2400.....$75.99
Asus M5A78L-M/USB3....................$59.79
Total.................................................$255.77
Sapphire R7-260X 2GB..................$119.99
Total with card.................................$375.76
Price difference between AMD A10-7800 vs AMD FX6300 $58
With AMD FX 6300 you get 6 cores and it's a proper desktop CPU. So I'm not being narrow minded. AMD's APU do have their places, but when it comes to real computing power for games, its crap. All this pom pom shaking about how good a APU is, is nothing but a waste of time. AMD needs to do something about their FX. Sadly they had given up and right now only focus on their APUs. If it wasn't for them to actually buy ATi, they probably won't be here today. it's their graphic cards that's keeping them up.
For those that still want to get a APU as a gaming PC, then get a AMD X4 740, 750K, or 760K because that money save, can be put towards a better video card.
AMD X4
AMD X4 760K........$89.99
Team 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 2400...$79.99
Asus A78M-A.................................$67.79
Total................................................$233.77
Sapphire R7-260X 2GB..................$119.99
Total with card.................................$353.76
AMD X4 740 with card...............$338.76
AMD X4 750K with card.............$343.76
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