AMD A10-6800K (Richland) APU Review

Overall we are very impressed with what the AMD Vision A10-6800K APU has to offer and it's a step in the right direction from AMD.  While it's not exactly groundbreaking, the new generation of APUs offer both performance improvements and power savings over the previous generation.

As we detailed in the review, we weren't able to overclock our sample of the A10-6800K as the only motherboard we had available for testing at the time of review, the Biostar Hi-Fi A85W had stability issues.  We look forward to revisiting this in the near future when with a different motherboard.

The 6800K offers a similar level of CPU performance to some of Intel's low-end i3 parts, however the graphics performance is considerably better.  The 6800K managed to achieve some impressive framerates, albeit at low settings, in DiRT Showdown and Call of Duty Black Ops 2 which are both reasonably demanding games.  It wasn't quite able to handle Battlefield 3 as smoothly as we would have liked, although it was just about playable.

Realistically, we would say that if you are wanting to buy a discrete graphics card you are better off looking at one of AMD's FX range processors or an Intel Core i5 processor, at extra cost.

We feel that the AMD Vision A10-6800K offers good value for money at a price of around £110 from Aria.  It is ideal for those users who don't need a discrete graphics card but would perhaps like to game occasionally or would like the performance benefits of GPU acceleration.  It is also be ideal for those users looking to build an HTPC as it offers more than enough grunt for this scenario.

Pros:

• Improved power efficiency.
• Decent performance.
• Good value for money.
• Supports faster memory.

Cons:

• We couldn't overclock it with our motherboard.
• Isn't cost effective with a discrete GPU.

KitGuru says: An impressive product that is a worthy upgrade from the previous generation.

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