AMD A10-7800 Review

AMD A10-7800 APU Review

Manufacturer: AMD
UK price: £120 (inc VAT) (approx)
US price: $153 (ex Tax)

When it comes to battling Intel at the low end, AMD has several weapons at its disposal but has slowly been ramping up the performance of its APUs. In particular, 2D performance and IPC have seen noticeable boosts over the last couple of generations, although Intel's similarly-priced Core-i3's still have an edge.

Its 3D and compute performance are extremely competitive though, and if you're looking to spend no more than £120 or so on a CPU and GPU, the A10-series APUs do make for compelling options.

Intel has muddied the waters a little with its Pentium G3258, which combined with an Asus H81 motherboard, can be overclocked to 4.6GHz+ for less than £100 for board and CPU. Add in an R7-series GPU - similar to that under the hood of the A10, and you'll have change from £170.

This puts it in direct competition with AMD's top-end APUs. The A10-7800 that we're looking at today is set to retail for around £120, but you'll obviously need to factor in a motherboard there too.

So this end of the market is getting ever more competitive, and AMD has covered yet another base with the A10-7800 that's launching today. It lacks the K-series designation so in short, there's no overclocking to be had - something that has provided hefty boosts to AMD's APU performance in the past and made them much more competitive.

With the A10-7800, AMD has optimised the configurable TDPs that it introduced with the launch of the Kaveri APUs, and which allow you to cater for desktop or HTPC/low power environments.

This is actually a feature that's available on most of its current APUs too and we looked at it specifically in our A8-7600 review, where you can also read our full analysis of the latest architecture. However, the configurable TDP has been optimised for the non K-series APUs specifically. At the low end of 45W, the A10-7800 is more power frugal than most of Intel's newer Haswell-based Pentium's, including the unlocked G3258, which have TDPs around 53W.

However, at 65W AMD claims it will offer more performance than a stock speed A10-7850K in some situations. The method by which you tweak the TDP varies from board to board but in general the setting is usually located in either the CPU advanced features or overclocking sections and makes direct reference to the TDP.

In terms of general features, pretty much everything else is similar or identical to the A10-7850K, except for the locked multiplier, of course. The A10-7800 has a default clock speed of 3.5GHz and a maximum of 3.9GHz, which is a little slower than the top-end APU, but still sports four physical Steamroller-based CPU compute cores and eight GPU compute cores, with the GPU itself offering 512 stream processors and a core speed of 720MHz.

A10-7800 Specifications

• Frequency 3.5GHz
  
• Turbo Frequency up to 3.9GHz
  
• Core Bulldozer (Steamroller)
  
• Manufacturing process 28nm
  
• Number of cores Four physical
  
• Memory controller Dual-channel DDR3
  
• Cache 4 x 16KB L1 data, 2 x 96KB L1 instruction, 4 x 2MB L2
  
• Packaging Socket FM2+
  
• Thermal Design Power (TDP) 45W
  
• Features SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4a, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, 256-bit AVX, AESNI, PCLMULQDQ, AMD64, AMD-V, MMX, FMA4, XOP, Turbo Core 3,0