[AT] AMD A8-7650K review

[AtenRa]

I kind of want to make a small PC I don't need for low-demand games. The CPU is somewhat reasonably priced for the GPU performance in a single package, but there are no cheap ITX motherboards... the cheapest FM2+ ITX is £70. The cheapest 1150 H81 is £50... and there's a random Z87 available for £50 as well.

£150 in AMD land gets you an ITX motherboard with this APU.
£150 in Intel land gets you an ITX motherboard with Pentium G3258 and R7 240 (or equivalent price NV GPU, but the R7 240 performance is equivalent or slightly higher than the APU so it's the obvious comparison).

The only game in the AT that a Pentium + 240 is faster than the A8-7650K is the GTA V. This is probably because they tested with low settings thus it is more CPU limited. Since the APU can produce almost 50fps on average at those settings, the game perhaps could be played at high image quality as well.
Also, with the price cuts in the Kaveri lineup, I would spend $20 for the 7850K. OC the iGPU to 900-960MHz (2400MHz mem) and you can play lots of games at 900/1080p.
You can later add a 250/250x and CF for more pref.

 

[DrMrLordX]

If you don't horribly lose the chip lottery you can push a 7850K to run stable @ 4Ghz with 1.2 and even bump up the NB to 2000(without having to mess with NB volt...but of course then there's iGPU OCing).

The lowest I've ever someone see that chip run stable @ 4 Ghz was 1.188V..which is insane considering some boards auto volt 4Ghz @ 1.41 Volt.

4 ghz @ 1.188v vcore is a strong result. It also shows which clockspeed ranges have the best performance/watt for Kaveri, which is clearly between 3.4 ghz and 4 ghz.

Kaveri is HORRIBLY overvolted...on the Athlon parts as well. My 860K happily accepts 4.1 Ghz @ 1.2 (wanted to see how far I can push 1.2 V stable)

The 860ks are a little more pliant. I'm convinced that there have been a few refinements to the 28nm process that got better overall yields and voltage characteristics in the newer Kaveri parts as compared to the old ones (2013 production run).

Especially after the price drop...this chip just got super competitive again (I mean 127$...come on. Getting a CPU+dGPU match up vs that is NOT easy). And it got enough brawn to play games in 1080...of course not at sexy settings unless it's the more casual mainstream games like LoL (which it easily maxes out with AA)

If you can figure out what to do with the extra 2 CUs over the 7650k, then yes, I agree. Sometimes they help and sometimes they don't. They really help for compute functions. Given the prices, either chip is a steal. It just depends on whether or not you think the memory bandwidth bottleneck is going to be a dealbreaker. It tends to get worse for the 7850k after iGPU overclocking is taken into account.

£150 in AMD land gets you an ITX motherboard with this APU.
£150 in Intel land gets you an ITX motherboard with Pentium G3258 and R7 240 (or equivalent price NV GPU, but the R7 240 performance is equivalent or slightly higher than the APU so it's the obvious comparison).

At that point, it really comes down to the applications you want to run, though you should also throw the 860k into the mix if you're looking at dGPUs. I was seriously looking at the G3258 myself, but the prices I paid for my 7700k and A88x-Pro were stupidly-low, so A10 was the obvious choice.

 

[Essence_of_War]

1280x1024 have 5.7% on steam hardware survey, 720P 1%

Sure. I didn't mean to claim that 1280x720 was more common than 1280x1024.

but OK, if you have a 900P/1080P (most users) screen and your GPU can't handle, lowering it to 720P is the natural choice, but still, for people playing games with IGPs, using an old 1280x1024 monitor seems OK.

Living room TVs are a big concern also. The biggest strength for APUs is in MITX or smaller enclosures as an HTPC/console-replacement/steam-box/what-have-you. Most living room TVs are natively 1920x1080, and at living room distances 1280x720 still looks really good. Halving the pixel count should give a nice performance bump is 1920x1080 is too demanding.

I think 1280x1024 is relevant for low end hardware testing.

It's quite relevant for low end desktop hardware, but as I said above, I don't think that is the intended competition vector, and it's getting less relevant because so many games are intended to be played at 16:9.

 

[DrMrLordX]

impressive. I'll have to play with undervolting some.

Just as an aside, this thread inspired me to do some undervolting on my A10-7700k. Right now it's chugging along @ 3.4 ghz with 1.075v vcore and 1.0375v vNB. I even bumped the RAM voltage down to 1.45v for kicks.

I had it at 1.05v vcore, but it appeared that the iGPU did not like it very much. The iGPU was also wonky at .95v vNB-1.025v vNB. All other stress testing I did was successful at those voltages, though.

So yeah there's definitely room for undervolting. The A8-7650k looks like it could/should do just fine @ 1.05v vcore or thereabouts.

 

[Abwx]

AMD claim that the 7650K should perform as well or better than the 7700K more or less hold, not counting that it connsume less by the virtue of the lower frequency.

A few interesting numbers from Planet3Dnow on their sample :

Stock voltage is 1.35V at 3.3GHz...

Overclocking at stock voltage under Prime 95 is stable up to 4.2.

Undervolting at stock frequency under Prime 95 stable down to 1.05V.

More interesting they isolated the full MB power comsumption thanks to a Pico PSU, power drain excluding the SSD is 13.2W at the MB ATX connector, usefull number that is never published.

CPU TDP can be easily estimated to be 45W at stcok in the most consuming test, this should yield 55W under Prime 95, still a long shot from the official 95W figure.

And even more interestingly the chipset, the A68H, is a low cost recent release for FM2+, good occasion to test a low cost high versatility plateform..

http://www.planet3dnow.de/cms/14312...ubpage-leistungsaufnahme-und-energieffizienz/