AMD Vision A10-6790K APU Review

1. Introduction2. The AMD A10-6790K APU3. Testing Methodology and Overclocking4. Synthetic: PCMark 85. Synthetic: 3DMark6. Synthetic: 3Dmark 117. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage8. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven9. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201310. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.511. Synthetic: Cinebench R1512. Synthetic: Super Pi13. Real World: WinRAR14. Real World: MKV Playback15. Real World: Media Encoding16. Gaming: Battlefield 417. Gaming: Call of Duty Black Ops 218. Gaming: DiRT Showdown19. Technical: Power Consumption20. Closing Thoughts21. View All Pages

Today we are going to take a look at the latest product in AMD's APU line-up, the Vision A10-6790K.  This is positioned just below the A10-6800K that we looked at a few months back and offers users almost as much power for slightly less money.  We were impressed with the A10-6800K when we looked at it back in June, and we look forward to seeing if this new model is as competitive.

AMD's line of APUs are pretty competitive at the low end of the market.  In this particular review, we are going to compare the A10-6790K with one of Intel's least powerful Core-i5 desktop chips, the i5-4430.

The fact that the A10-6790K is one of the most powerful models in AMD's APU lineup shows how this range compares against Intel's line-up.

While AMD hasn't been able to compete with Intel at the top end of the market for a good few years now, this particular APU has a number of distinct advantages over Intel's.  One of the most significant advantages is represented by the ‘K' suffix at the end of the A10-6790K's name.  This denotes that this APU is completely unlocked, giving us a wide range of overclocking options.

Also, the AMD Radeon integrated graphics are widely regarded as superior to Intel's integrated graphics.  This is great for those users who don't want to invest in a discrete graphics card but want to enjoy some of the benefits.

In this review we will be focusing on the performance of the AMD A10-6790K compared to the Intel Core i5-4430.

AMD have kindly supplied us with an OEM model of the A10-6790K for testing today.  As this is an OEM sample, it is devoid of any retail packaging or bundled accessories.

The A10-6790K is based on the same Richland architecture as the A10-6800K that we reviewed back in June.  Consequently is features the same advances over the previous generation which include support for 2133 MHz memory instead of 1600 MHz.  As the onboard graphics card utilises the system memory, this promises quite a bump in graphics performance over the previous generation.

As it's name suggests, the A10-6790K is almost capable of the same performance as the A10-6800K. When comparing the specifications side by side, they are identical apart from the clock speeds, both featuring four cores and 4 MB of on-board cache. The base and turbo clock speeds both come in 100 MHz lower than those of the A10-6800K at 4.0 GHz and 4.3 GHz respectively.

We mentioned earlier in the review that this particular model carries the ‘K' suffix at the end of its model number, signifying that it is completely unlocked.  This means, with minimal effort, the clock speeds could be bumped up 100 MHz each to match those of the A10-6800K.  While the wholesale price of the A10-6790K only comes in $10 lower than the A10-6800K, the difference in performance can easily be made up through overclocking.

Like the A10-6800K, the A10-6790K features the AMD Radeon HD 8670 GPU onboard.  This boasts a clock speed of 844 MHz which is linked to the baseclock, meaning you can overclock the GPU portion of the chip too if desired.

In our tests we will be comparing the performance of the AMD A10-6790K in both stock and overclock states with the Intel Core i5-4430.  The Intel CPU is locked down so we will be testing it in a stock configuration.  We will also include comparisons with the AMD A10-6800K where relevant.

Test System:

AMD A10-6790K with  ASrock FM2A88X Extreme6+
AMD A10-6800K with  ASrock FM2A88X Extreme6+
Intel Core i5-4430 with Gigabyte GA-Z87P-D3

Memory: AMD Gaming Series 2133 MHz
Power Supply: Seasonic Platinum 1000W
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 8670D
CPU Cooler: Noctua U14S
Hard Drive: Corsair Neutron 240 GB
Monitor: Viewsonic VX2260WM
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)

Software:

PCMark 8
3DMark
3DMark 11
3DMark Vantage
SiSoft Sandra 2013
Cinebench R11.5
Cinebench R15
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 4
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

Overclocking

We managed to achieve a fairly respectable 4.5 GHz overclock with the AMD A10-6790K on our ASRock FM2A88X Extreme6+ motherboard by increasing the multiplier to 45x and bumping the core voltage to 1.3875V.  See validation here.

This is a little behind the 4.7 GHz we achieved with the A10-6800K on the same motherboard using the EZ overclocking feature which doesn't seem to support the A10-6790K at present as it doesn't appear with this CPU installed.

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 the Intel system edges ahead of both overclocked AMD chips, indicating that this is a more CPU intensive benchmark.

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.

In this test we can see how much better the graphics performance of the AMD chips are compared to the Intel.  The CPU performance of the overclocked A10-6790K can't match the Intel chips however.

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.

In this test we can see similar results to the previous benchmark, with the Intel chip edging ahead in terms of CPU performance and the AMD excelling in graphics performance.

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.

Again, the CPU performance of the Intel chip outstrips that of both overclocked AMD models, while the AMD models offered better graphics performance.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

In this test, the A10-6790K exhibited slightly better performance than the Intel i5-4430.

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

All three of the SiSoft Sandra tests measure the raw CPU performance of each chip.  We can see that the Intel i5-4430 achieved significantly better performance than the A10-6790K.

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.

Again, we see the Intel i5-4430 achieve significantly better performance than the A10-6790K in this CPU intensive test.

CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Iron Man 3, Oblivion, Life of Pi or Prometheus and many more.  Cinbench R15 is the latest version of this benchmark.

Here we see similar results to the previous version of Cinebench, highlighting the raw processing strength of the Intel chip compared to the AMD A10-6790K.

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.

In this test the Intel i5-4430 achieved significantly better performance than the A10-6790K, taking around half the time to complete the test.

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 performance using the inbuilt benchmark.

In this test we see slight bumps in performance with both AMD chips when overclocked, however the Intel chip performed considerably better than both of them.

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.

There is very little to choose between the two processors in this test, however the A10-6790K exhibited marginally better performance.

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.

In this test, we can see how the raw processing performance of the Intel CPU can save you time in a real world scenario compared to both AMD chips.

Battlefield 4 (also known as BF4) is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. The game is a sequel to 2011′s Battlefield 3. Battlefield 4 is built on the new Frostbite 3 engine. The new Frostbite engine enables more realistic environments with higher resolution textures and particle effects. A new “networked water” system is also being introduced, allowing all players in the game to see the same wave at the same time.Tessellation has also been overhauled.

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

In this test, the overclocked AMD system offered what we would consider to be playable framerates, however the stock system and the Intel system didn't fare so well.  All configurations performed well considering how new this game is, though.

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 particular test, overclocking the A10-6790K didn't have much of an effect on performance.  However this game proved a little too much for the chip to handle anyway, with frequent drops to unplayable framerates.  Our Intel test system didn't agree with this game either and crashed every time we tried to load it up.

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.

Both the stock and overclocked AMD configurations offered very respectable performance in this test.  We were also surprised how well the Intel system performed, even though it didn't achieve anywhere near as high scores as the AMD configurations.

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.

It's not surprising that the AMD A10-6790K consumes significantly more power than the Intel i5-4430 when under load as powerful graphics tend to consume a lot of electricity.  We were very impressed by the idle result recorded by the stock AMD system, though.

Overall we are impressed with what the AMD Vision A10-6790K APU offers. While there isn't much to choose between this and the A10-6800K, the small price saving is likely to sway a number of users considering the performance gap can be compensated for by some very simple overclocking.

We weren't able to achieve such a good overclock with the A10-6790K as we did with the A10-6800K, yielding only 4.5 GHz compared to 4.7 GHz.  This is likely down to the ‘silicon lottery', however we would certainly recommend the A10-6800K for those users who are looking to achieve the most impressive overclock.

In our testing we compared the A10-6790K APU to the slightly more expensive Intel Core i5-4430.  The common theme throughout our testing showed significantly better CPU performance from the Intel 4430 and significantly better graphics performance from the AMD 6790K.

We would therefore say that the A10-6790K is better suited to those users who plan to engage in casual gaming and relatively demanding multimedia activities.

Although the AMD Vision A10-6790K is not yet on sale in the UK, the market price is $10 less than that of the A10-6800K which can be purchased for £110 from Overclockers UK.  We would therefore imagine that the A10-6790K will be priced at around £105 when it comes to market.

At this price, we would be tempted to pay the extra £5 and go for the 6800K, however, most users probably wouldn't notice the difference between the two.

Pros:

• Impressive graphics performance.
• Unlocked multiplier.
• Small cost saving over A10-6800K.

Cons:

• Intel still retains the edge in raw CPU processing performance.

KitGuru says: The AMD A10-6790K exhibits significantly better graphics performance than Intel's i5 4430.

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