AMD Trinity A10 5800k performance demonstration

You always need to be at least a little suspicious when a company shows you a set of comparative benchmarks. But, as they say, forwarned is forarmed. AMD had a number of systems on show in London yesterday and world famous overclocking expert (and now AMD PR expert) Sami Makinen on hand to show some of the cooler features.

Right now, KitGuru Labs folks are taking the new Trinity APU apart and putting in-depth results together in a variety of useful and interesting ways. But you will need to wait a little longer for that.

What the UK was shown yesterday was a series of demonstrations that put the new A10 5800k next to the Intel Core i5 3550 processor. What was happening at the software/BIOS levels, we can't comment on – but the rest of the physical specifications appeared identical:-

• FM2 Vs Socket 1155 mainboards
• 8GB DDR3 1600MHz memory (2x4GB)
• 450w PSU in an ATX chassis
• Booting and running off an SSD

.
Now on to the demonstrations themselves. AMD has been working on a number of bundling deals recently and Sleeping Dogs is one of the latest offers. In our recent interview with Intel's Richard Huddy, he explained carefully that his company's key focus is to create a good ‘straight out of the box' experience. Specifically:-

.
So AMD's decision to show a Core i5 against a Trinity A10 5800k ‘straight out of the box' seems reasonable enough, but there are caveates.

Unfortunately, Richard Huddy was talking about Intel HD4000 graphics and in the demonstration given by AMD's Sami Makinen, Sleeping Dogs was running at around 10fps on the Intel system with HD2500 graphics. On the AMD machine, the same part of the same game was delivering 30fps.

Given that Trinity is the best of the APU graphics solutions, it would have been nice to see a head-to-head with HD4000. But that is one of AMD's advantages. Intel does not offer the HD4000 solution until you get to much more expensive processors like the 3570k. So this comparison is fair in the ‘what you get for similar money' sense.

Sami is a master-over-clocker by anyone's standards, so in the next demonstration he showed how easy it was to put a +30% overclock on the Trinity A10 5800k's graphics capability using AMD's desktop tool – which translated into a linear increase in the Sleeping Dogs in-game frame rate to 39fps.

We were then treated to a side-by-side comparison using a piece of photo manipulation software we haven't seen before. Given that Adobe has free 30-day trials for Photoshop CS6, we're not sure why AMD didn't use the industry leading software for this comparison, but the results were still interesting.

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgFBYL1OI-8′]

KitGuru says: If the price, availability and CrossFire scalability of the new Trinity products matches the confidence levels being given off by the AMD demo team, then it looks like the sub-£600 desktop space is about to get very competitive. The big question will be how much weight publication editors and – ultimately – consumers give to smooth graphics, as well as how much work software developers do in order to optimise code for AMD's APU architecture.

Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.

Become a Patron!