AMD A10 5700 and 5800K Review

Taking the next step in delivering discrete class graphics in an integrated solution, the AMD A10 APUs are set to raise the benchmark for mainstream performance.

Product on Review: AMD A10-5700 & A10-5800K APU
Manufacturer and Sponsor: AMD

Street Price: £90-95inc. VAT (GBP)

Coming in at the top of the pack, the A10 APUs mark the next step in mainstream computing. Though the CPU cores are identical to what we have seen previously in the A8-5600K, the A10 5700 and 5800K have the 384 core HD 7660D GPU strapped to its side. Claiming to give 25-45% performance over the previous generation within the same power frame, The A10 APUs are pushing performance per Watt in a positive direction.

The A10-5800K is the top flight APU and being an unlocked black edition, it may provide new heights in integrated performance, to find out let’s put it to the test.

AMD’s Overview of the APU

Do more in less time with energy-efficient desktops. With AMD’s APU, a multicore CPU and discrete-level GPU on a single power-efficient chip, you get the visual performance you need for the best choice for digital entertainment and gaming. With even more compute performance, graphics are crisp, bright and smooth, and content is easy to share.

Features & Specifications

Specifications
Model Name: A10-5700, 5800K
Radeon™ Brand: HD 7660D
CPU Clock Speed: 3.4GHz/4.0GHz, 3.8GHz/4.2GHz
CPU Cores on Die: 4 cores
TDP: 65W, 100W
Total L2 Cache: 4MB
Radeon™ Cores on Die: 384
GPU Clock Speed: 760 MHz, 800 MHz
DDR3 Speed: 1866MHz
Instruction Set Extensions MMX(+) SSE (1,2,3,3S,4.1,4.2,4A) x86-64, AMD-V, AES, AVX, XOP, FMA4/3
Lithography 32nm

Features
– AMD Eyefinity Technology – Immerse yourself in panoramic gaming and entertainment across up to four monitors with AMD Eyefinity Technology.

– AMD HD Media Accelerator – Experience HD video the way you should with accelerated conversion and smooth playback from AMD HD Media Accelerator.

– AMD Quick Stream Technology – Stop waiting for the buffer to catch up – get fast, smooth internet streaming with the powerful APU graphics with AMD Quick Stream Technology.

– AMD Steady Video Technology 2.0 – Vacation video shouldn’t make you dizzy – helping to eliminate shaking from home video is only one click away with AMD Steady Video Technology 2.0. Automatically stabilize home and Web video with advanced settings and one click control.

– AMD Perfect Picture HD – Images jump off the page and burst into life in vivid color with enhanced resolution and contrast of AMD Perfect Picture HD.

– AMD Radeon™ Dual Graphics – Push graphics and gaming performance to the extreme with the power of two – AMD Radeon™ Dual Graphics.

– AMD Radeon™ HD Graphics – Get everything you ever wanted out of your graphics – crisp & sharp photos, movies and games with the phenomenal discrete-level performance of AMD Radeon™ HD Graphics.

– AMD Turbo Core Technology 3.0 – Amazing performance when you’re pushing your system to the limits, with scaled back power consumption for everyday activities to help keep your system running cool & quiet.

– AMD Accelerated Video Converter – Take your tunes & movies with you – convert, sync and enjoy your video and music files quickly and easily with AMD Accelerated Video Converter.

AMD HD3D Technology – Become part of the 3D gaming and entertainment experience with cutting-edge AMD HD3D Technology.
AMD Internet Acceleration – Get your browsing done quickly with Web sites that load fast with AMD Internet Acceleration.
AMD App Acceleration – Speed up everyday applications with the power of more graphics cores and AMD App Acceleration.

Closer Look

The pair of A10 APUs

The customary IHS shot of the AMD chips, on the top it would be easy to mistake for any other AMD CPU/APU (well maybe not the G34 based chips), but underneath the heatspreader lies AMDs latest technology.

FM2 pins galore

The A10-5700 APU

The A10-5800K APU

Test Setup

A85X Setup
Motherboard – GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4
RAM – Xtreem LV PC3 19200 DDR3 LV 2400
HDD – Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 7200RPM SATAIII
Power Supply – NZXT Hale82 650W
Cooler – CoolerMaster Hyper 212+

Strapping a more potent cooler on the A10-5800K to find out the OC potential

APU Configurations
A10-5800K @ 3.8GHz/4.2GHz (100MHz x 38/42. 1333MHz 9-9-9-24)
@ OC 4.6GHz (112 x41, 2396MHz 10-11-11-28)
@ RAM OC 1600MHz 9-9-9-24, 1866MHz 9-9-9-24, 2133MHz 10-10-10-28, 2400MHz 11-11-11-28
HD 7660D integrated graphics (OC @ 1000MHz)

A10-5700 @ 3.4GHz/4.0GHz (100MHz x 34/40, 1333MHz 9-9-9-24)
@ OC 4.09GHz (117MHz x35, 2200MHz 10-11-10-28)
HD 7660D integrated graphics (OC @ 850MHz)

Overclocking

The A10-5700 has a locked multiplier but a small OC is possible using the baseclock. Unfortunately this would solely be dependent on what motherboard you are using. I managed to hit just under 4.1GHz on the CPU and 850MHz for the GPU. These settings are stable and should give a nice performance boost to stock settings, however, this APU is not aimed at overclockers and offers the HD 7660D GPU at a slightly reduced cost to the A10-5800K.

The A10-5800K is a whole different story. Being a black edition APU it has an unlocked multiplier and significant performance gains could be possible. Working up to find a maximum speed for the APU I managed to boot in at 4.8GHz, these settings were slightly unstable and could possible be held stable with high end cooling. Pushing a high 1.6V through the CPU thermals are likely through the roof on the CM 212+. The HD 7660D was able to hold a huge 1200MHz, that is a 50% OC! Again slightly unstable and likely thermal dependent. This was with a NB voltage of 1.38V. These settings may be able to be made stable with the right settings and cooling. Backing down the frequencies to 4.6GHz and 1000MHz I was able to maintain stable operating and is the final settings we will use for the overclocked testing.

A10-5800K stock settings

HD 7660D Stock settings

Hitting a high OC

50% OC on the HD 7660D could be possible given a little time

A10-5800K Final OC settings

HD 7660D Final OC settings

OC memory settings

Power Consumption

It’s interesting to note the power consumption across all motherboards because energy results can fluctuate between manufacturers due to the features and specifications that are integrated. First of all, for the idle tests the system is cold booted into Windows and no additional applications are executed – the watts are noted on the external energy monitor we use. Then the system is loaded with LinX 0.6.4 and MSI Kombustor simultainiously – watts are again monitored throughout the period of testing and the highest rated watts are then noted down. Below are the results of this energy test.

At stock, idle usage falls about on par with the previous flagship, the A8-3870K and peak usage of the A10s fall a little under that used by the A8-3870K. The small overclock on the 5700 increases power draw to about the same as if you were using a discrete HD 6570 and the overclocked 5800K, though having a high idle, falls around the same as the other overclocked APUs at load. These figures should give a good indication of an increased performance per watt ratio.

Synthetic Benchmarks: AIDA64

Memory Tests

Memory bandwidth benchmarks (Memory Read, Memory Write, Memory Copy) measure the maximum achiveable memory data transfer bandwidth. The code behind these benchmark methods are written in Assembly and they are extremely optimized for every popular AMD and Intel processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x86, MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2 or SSE4.1 instruction set extension.

The Memory Latency benchmark measures the typical delay when the CPU reads data from system memory. Memory latency time means the penalty measured from the issuing of the read command until the data arrives to the integer registers of the CPU.

CPU Queen Benchmark

This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example — with HyperThreading disabled — the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.

CPU Photoworxx Benchmark

This benchmark stresses the integer arithmetic and multiplication execution units of the CPU and also the memory subsystem. Due to the fact that this test performs high memory read/write traffic, it cannot effectively scale in situations where more than 2 processing threads used. For example, on a 8-way Pentium III Xeon system the 8 processing threads will be “fighting” over the memory, creating a serious bottleneck that would lead to as low scores as a 2-way or 4-way similar processor based system could achieve. CPU PhotoWorxx test uses only the basic x86 instructions, and it is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware.

CPU AES Benchmark

This benchmark measures CPU performance using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) data encryption. In cryptography AES is a symmetric-key encryption standard. AES is used in several compression tools today, like 7z, RAR, WinZip, and also in disk encryption solutions like BitLocker, FileVault (Mac OS X), TrueCrypt.CPU AES test uses only the basic x86 instructions, and it’s hardware accelerated on VIA PadLock Security Engine capable VIA C3, VIA C7, VIA Nano and VIA QuadCore processors; and on Intel AES-NI instruction set extension capable processors. The test is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware.

FPU Mandel Benchmark

This benchmark measures the double precision (also known as 64-bit) floating-point performance through the computation of several frames of the popular “Mandelbrot” fractal. The code behind this benchmark method is written in Assembly, and it is extremely optimized for every popular AMD, Intel and VIA processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x87, SSE2, AVX or FMA4 instruction set extension. FPU Mandel test is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware.

Synthetic Benchmarks: x264 HD

Simply put, this test measures how fast your machine can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality x264 video clip. What’s x264, you ask? It’s more or less the next-generation Xvid/DivX codec. I think it’s ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process, and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently.

Synthetic Benchmarks: Cinebench 11.5

CPU Rendering

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

Even heavily overclocked the Piledriver architecture falls short in CPU rendering.

Open GL Graphics Rendering

This procedure uses a complex 3D scene depicting a car chase (by renderbaron) which measures the performance of your graphics card in OpenGL mode. The performance depends on various factors, such as the GPU processor on your hardware, but also on the drivers used. The graphics card has to display a huge amount of geometry (nearly 1 million polygons) and textures, as well as a variety of effects, such as environments, bump maps, transparency, lighting and more to evaluate the performance across different disciplines and give a good average overview of the capabilities of your graphics hardware.

The overclocked HD 7660D manages to match the HD 6570 in this open GL benchmark.

Synthetic Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA 2012

SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but I believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed. We will be considering – CPU, memory and GPGPU tests.

SANDRA reveals the strengths of the A10 APUs

Synthetic Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA 2012 cont…

In the GPGPU tests we can see the HD 7660D Rule the roost out performing overclocked APUs as well as a discrete HD 6570, and that is at stock! Overclocked settings show off a significant margin over the other setups tested.

Synthetic Benchmarks: 3DMark Vantage & 3DMark 11

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage is the industry standard performance benchmark for DirectX 10 gaming PCs. It includes two graphics tests, two CPU tests and six feature tests. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark Vantage is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 10 under game-like loads.

3DMark 11

Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

Synthetic Benchmarks: PCMark 7 & UNIGINE Heaven 3.0

UNIGINE Heaven 3.0

Unigine’s benchmark is to showcase the benefits of DX 11 and the use of tessellation as opposed to normal rendering techniques. The demo has impressive visuals that give an insight into what we can expect from gaming in the future.

PCMark 7

PCMark 7 is a tool provided by FutureMark that tests the PCs ability in general office and everyday use. It produces a number that reflects the all-round performance of the PC and is useful to compare between differing setups. For more information, visit the FutureMark website.

Game Benchmarks: AVP, Deus Ex:HR, Shogun 2

Alien Vs. Predator

Spawned from the popular Alien and Predator franchises, Rebellion have collaborated to bring the legendary war to us through the medium of a first-person shooter. The game forces you to hunt, prey and most importantly survive in the swamp colony of Freya’s prospect as a Predator, Alien or Marine. The stunning visuals add to the sense of dread and terror that we have become so accustomed to seeing with the series.

The stand-alone Alien VS Predator benchmark tool was used for testing here. All the settings were set to very high and Tessellation was applied. The average FPS was recorded at the end.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

You play Adam Jensen, an ex-SWAT specialist who’s been handpicked to oversee the defensive needs of one of America’s most experimental biotechnology firms. Your job is to safeguard company secrets, but when a black ops team breaks in and kills the very scientists you were hired to protect, everything you thought you knew about your job changes.

Shogun 2

In the darkest age of Japan, endless war leaves a country divided. It is the middle of the 16th Century in Feudal Japan. The country, once ruled by a unified government, is now split into many warring clans. Ten legendary warlords strive for supremacy as conspiracies and conflicts wither the empire. Only one will rise above all to win the heart of a nation as the new shogun…The others will die by his sword.

Game Benchmarks: TESV, DiRT Showdown, Sleeping Dogs

TESV: Skyrim

The Empire of Tamriel is on the edge. The High King of Skyrim has
been murdered. Alliances form as claims to the throne are made. In the midst of this conflict, a far more dangerous, ancient evil is awakened. Dragons, long lost to the passages of the Elder Scrolls, have returned to Tamriel. The future of Skyrim, even the Empire itself, hangs in the balance as they wait for the prophesized Dragonborn to come; a hero born with the power of The Voice, and the only one who can stand amongst the dragons.

DiRT Showdown

DiRT Showdown is the new arcade racing game from the team that brought you the award-winning DiRT series, uncaged in 2012. Pick up and play controls combine with electrifying events, frenzied crowds and stunning graphics to deliver high octane, dive in and drive thrills from event one. DiRT Showdown comes with phenomenal graphical performance, bone-jarring damage, and social online and split-screen multiplayer as standard. Welcome to DiRT Showdown – a new world of driving delirium.

Sleeping Dogs

Welcome to Hong Kong, a vibrant neon city teeming with life, whose exotic locations and busy streets hide one of the most powerful and dangerous criminal organizations in the world: the Triads. You play the role of Wei Shen, an undercover cop trying to take down the Triads from the inside out. You’ll have to prove yourself worthy as you fight your way up the organization, taking part in brutal criminal activities without blowing your cover. Torn between your loyalty to the badge and a criminal code of honor, you will risk everything as the lines between truth, loyalty and justice become permanently blurred.

Other Observations: Ram OC, Graphics Performance

Testing the A10-5800K GPU with different memory speeds, we can see a mean average of 11.23% increase with 1600MHz memory, 18.25% with 1866MHz, 24.96% with 2133MHz, 33.45% using 2400MHz and a staggering 50.67% performance increase with an OC with the possibility of more performance with higher OC/ faster memory. The A10 is pushing the boundary of what can be playable on an integrated solution. Compared to the A8-3870Ks HD 6550D, the HD 7660D scores a mean average of 32% increase in performance based on using DDR3 1866MHz memory speeds.

Conclusion

A few years ago, integrated graphics were nothing short of abysmal and was relegated to the realm of word processing, cheap pre-builds and last resort backup when your graphics card broke. Today, we have seen integrated graphics and SoC solutions come leaps and bounds with the A10 APUs accompanied by the HD 7660D iGPU leading the pack. We have started to see mostly playable frame rates at high resolution and decent graphics settings in the right setup within an acceptable power usage too.

There are a few downsides still, CPU performance lacks a little, and even though performance per watt is up, many may see the hilarity in a CPU @ 4.6GHz barely beating or on par with a CPU clocked around 1GHz less. IPCC aside, the other argument is, for the price, you may get better gaming performance with a cheap Intel chip and a £50 graphics card such as the AMD HD 6670. It may be closer to the truth to say that the 2nd Gen APUs are closer to the Intel I3s in performance, but when looking to game, good graphics that are fed by a quick CPU is still going to have an advantage. Overclocked, the A10s were able to best the HD 6570 many occasions and likely are near on par with the HD 6670, however, when considering platform cost, you may need a more expensive A85X motherboard, a decent cooler and some high performance memory to maximise your performance. Still, rather than floating about in limbo this time round, the A10 APUs have a clear reason to choose them. Yes you may be able to get slightly better pure gaming performance for a little less, but as a complete all round quality platform, spending that little more can get you a little bit extra in the way of luxuries for everyday use and computing.

Something that is mentioned a lot in regards to AMDs APUs, is the ‘mainstream’ consumer to which they target, that is, the social networker, the student, the online shopper, the casual gamer, and those who like movies and music. This effectively covers everyone who has power flowing into their home. The A10 APUs have the technology and wizardry to provide a seamless experience for most users without having to worry about choosing the right CPU and GPU combo to get decent performance out of their system. The A10 APUs should also serve as a wake up call as to what to expect in future as it is because of this current progression, a larger chunk of low end discrete graphics cards may start finding their way to silicon heaven.

The A10-5800K can cater for many needs and is seriously worth considering in a sub £400 build and I have no hesitation giving it the Gold award. The A10-5700 is worthy of considering should you not wish to overclock but want to gain from the extra performance of the HD 7660D iGPU. Though it seems to be too close in price to the 5800K to really choose it instead of the black edition. If you do not need the extra graphics performance, one may be better off choosing the A8-5600K or an Intel alternative, for those reasons the A10-5700 receives our silver award.

Pros.
+ Leading discrete level performance in an integrated solution
+ Overclocking potential on CPU + GPU (5800K)
+ Increased performance per Watt compared to previous generation
+ Good all round platform

Cons.
– Requires high performance memory to make the most of the HD 7660D
– Price difference barely warrants consideration over the 5800K (5700)