AMD A10-6800K (Richland) APU Review

1. Introduction2. AMD A10-6800K Richland APU3. Testing Methodology4. Synthetic: PCMark 85. Synthetic: PCMark 76. Synthetic: 3DMark7. Synthetic: 3Dmark 118. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage9. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201310. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.511. Synthetic: Super Pi12. Real World: WinRAR13. Real World: MKV Playback14. Real World: Media Encoding15. Gaming: Battlefield 316. Gaming: Call of Duty Black Ops 217. Gaming: DiRT Showdown18. Technical: Power Consumption19. Closing Thoughts20. View All Pages

Today we are going to take a look at the latest ‘Richland’ APUs from AMD which have been refreshed with ‘Piledriver’ cores to enhance performance. There are numerous other improvements including the addition of 2133 MHz memory support for the A10 models.

Since AMD released their first APUs back in 2011, they have become popular among those users who were looking for a reasonably powerful system on a budget. AMD’s APUs tend to offer better graphical performance than Intel’s integrated solutions, making them ideal for those users who want to enjoy decent frame rates without the additional cost of a discrete card.

Today we look at AMD's flagship A10-6800K processor – if you already own one of the previous generation, is it a worthy upgrade?

Specification

AMD have kindly supplied us with the A10-6800K for testing which is their range topping model.

As mentioned previously, one of the most significant improvements is a memory controller on the A10-6800K which is fully compatible with 2,133 MHz memory.  We have previously found with AMDs APUs that the memory frequency makes a large difference to the graphics performance in particular, so this is a welcome upgrade from 1600 MHz on the previous platform.

AMD have also increased the clock speed of the top-end model of the series from 3.8 GHz with the A10-5800K to 4.1 GHz with the A10-6800K which should help boost performance.  Both models have a turbo mode, allowing the A10-6800K to clock up to 4.4 GHz on demand.  The ‘K' at the end of the model number denotes that this model has an unlocked multiplier, giving you more options when it comes to overclocking.

The A10-6800K has on an onboard HD 8670D GPU boasting a clock speed of 844 MHz which, like the previous model, is tied to the baseclock so can be overclocked through the BIOS.  There are 384 GPU cores on this range-topping model and the A10-6700, while the A8-6600K and A8-6500 only boast 256.

AMD supplied us with a 16 GB memory kit from their Radeon Gamer series.  This comprised of four 4 GB modules which are capable of 2133 MHz out of the box with timings of 10-11-11-30.  They feature low profile heatspreaders which makes them ideal for those who plan to use air cooling with this system as it will prevent any compatibility issues.

Unfortunately we had stability issues when overclocking the A10-6800K with our Biostar Hi-Fi A85W, despite updating it to the latest edition of the BIOS so we are only including stock results in this test.

While we were easily able to get the system to boot at 4.8 GHz, we couldn't achieve stability at more than 4.4 GHz.

If you wanted to upgrade from the A8 5600k how much additional performance would you get? Today we will find out.

Test System:

AMD A10-6800K
AMD A8-5600K

Motherboard: Biostar Hi-Fi A85W
Memory: AMD Gaming Series 2133 MHz
Power Supply: Seasonic Platinum 1000W
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 8670D
Graphics Card (Dual Graphics): AMD Radeon HD 6670
CPU Cooler: Phanteks PH-TC14PE
Hard Drive: Corsair Neutron 240 GB
Monitor: Viewsonic VX2260WM
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)

Software:

PCMark 8
PCMark 7
3DMark
3DMark 11
3DMark Vantage
SiSoft Sandra 2013
Cinebench R11.5
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.7
VLC Media Player
Performance Monitor
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Super Pi 1.5 Mod
CPUID Hardware Monitor
CPU-Z
GPU-Z
WinRAR
DiRT Showdown
Battlefield 3
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

PCMark 8 is the latest version in the popular series of PC benchmarking tools. Improving on previous releases, PCMark 8 includes battery life measurement tools and new tests using popular applications from Adobe and Microsoft. Whether you are looking for long battery life, or maximum power, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for your needs.

In this test we see a significantly higher scores with the 6800K, part of which is due to the improvements in technology with the new platform and partly due to the higher-end nature of this chip compared to the A8-5600K.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

Here we see similar results to PCMark 8, with the 6800K achieving a significantly higher score.

3DMark is Futuremark’s latest benchmark. It can be used to benchmark and compare everything from mobile devices, such as smart phones, tablets and laptops, to high-end gaming systems. The benchmark is available for Windows, Windows RT Android and iOS.

With 3 separate tests, each of which is intended to be used alongside a specific classification of hardware, 3DMark is a very versatile benchmark. Ice Storm is intended to be used with mobile devices, Cloud Gate is good for use with laptops and home PCs, and Fire Strike can be used to push the performance of gaming PCs.

We used the ‘Fire Strike’ benchmark which is designed to be used on gaming PCs. We opted for the Normal setting, NOT the Extreme mode.

These results are fairly weak compared to systems with dedicated GPUs but are impressive considering the integrated nature of the graphics on both processors.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

Again, performance isn't particularly strong in this benchmark but is excellent considering the integrated graphics.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

As we would expect, overclocking significantly boosts the CPU score of the system.

The results tell the same story as the previous two 3DMark tests, showing strong performance considering the integrated nature of the graphics chip.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

In these tests we can see the raw processing power of the CPU portion of the APU which is fairly impressive.  We can also see the excellent memory performance scores with the 2133 MHz memory.

Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

This test lets us see how performance can benefit from using multi-threaded applications with the 6800K, showing an impressive performance return with all the cores being utilized.

Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU.

This test shows the single threaded performance of the 6800K which is noticeably better than that of the 5600K.

WinRAR is one of the most popular archive manager programs available. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. You can try WinRAR before buy, its trial version is available in downloads.

We measured the time taken to archive two 2.75 GB .MKV files.

Here we see a slight improvement in performance with the 6800K, illustrating how you will get better performance in the real world when compressing and uncompressing files.

The Matroska Media container is a very popular, open standard Multimedia container which is usually found as .MKV files. It is a very popular format in enthusiast circles and can be played directly in VLC or Windows Media Player with suitable codecs installed.

We played our 1080P MKV movie using the latest version of VLC Media Player and measured the CPU usage with the Performance Monitor built into Windows.

In this test we see a significant reduction in CPU usage with the 6800K which leaves more processor time available for other tasks.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1.43 GB 720p MKV file to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device using the Apple preset. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power.  Hardware acceleration was enabled to give you a good idea of system wide real world performance.

Again, we can see the real world benefits of the new 6800K APU as it takes less time to convert our test video file.

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing.

This particular game proved to be a little too demanding for the APU.  We have left this in the review as it illustrates the limitations of the integrated graphics well.

Black Ops 2 is the latest episode in the Call of Duty franchise and is one of the most popular games of the moment.  It uses an updated version of the IW engine, used in previous Call of Duty games, which isn't particularly demanding.  This makes it ideal for testing mid-range gaming systems like this.

We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing.

In this game we can see that the 6800K achieved fairly good framerates when gaming at 1080P even though the quality settings were set fairly low.  This is a great example of how this particular platform is ideal for those who game occasionally or have a very restricted budget.

Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007.

We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing with all other settings set to the ‘Low' presets.

Again, we see impressive results in DiRT considering the integrated GPU.

We measured the power consumption of our entire test system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark. We recorded results with the system at reference clock speeds.

Here we can see the power reductions AMD has managed to achieve with the latest generation of this platform.  The 6800K consumes less power than the 5600K under load even though it's a more powerful processor.

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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