Today we look at AMD’s refreshed flagship for the FM2 platform, the A10-6800K APU. As part of the new ‘Elite’ branding, can we expect elite performance?
Product on Review: AMD Elite A10-6800K APU
Manufacturer and Sponsor: AMD
Current Street Price: £120 inc. VAT (GBP)
AMD have taken the gaming world more seriously of late, evident with the ‘Gaming Evolved’ campaign being ever present in many recent PC titles as well as now having their APU technology being utilised in the coming next generation gaming consoles from Sony and Microsoft. Though these are earmarks for the success of the APU, the continually increasing demand in desktop performance gives rise to the latest 6000 series refresh for the FM2 platform. Though the names (or numbers) have changed as well as the new ‘Elite’ branding for their top tier products, the A10-6800K is essentially a higher clocked, cherry picked, ‘Trinity’ chip. The core speed is up to 4.1GHz/ 4.4GHz compared to the 3.8GHz – 4.1GHz of the A10-5800K and the GPU core clock has been increased to 844MHz from 800MHz. Another noticeable change is that 2133MHz memory is now ‘officially’ supported.
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.
Specifications & Features
Model Name: A10-6800K
Radeon™ Brand: HD 8670D
CPU Clock Speed: 4.1/4.4 GHz
CPU Cores on Die: 4 cores
TDP: 100W
Total L2 Cache: 4MB
Radeon™ Cores on Die: 384
GPU Clock Speed: 844 MHz
DDR3 Speed: 2133 MHz
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
Radeon™ Brand: HD 8670D
CPU Clock Speed: 4.1/4.4 GHz
CPU Cores on Die: 4 cores
TDP: 100W
Total L2 Cache: 4MB
Radeon™ Cores on Die: 384
GPU Clock Speed: 844 MHz
DDR3 Speed: 2133 MHz
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
List of AMD APUs
Much of the A10-6800K and its features are similar (if not identical) to the previous A10-5800K, while we could talk about the clock speed improvements in the CPU and GPU as well as now officially supporting 2133MHz memory speeds, it is more important to mention ‘why’ AMD are now able to incorporate these higher clock speeds within the same thermal frame.
New features of the Richland APU
The answer is a revamp in the voltage and temperature sensors that allow for a more intelligent Turbo Core feature, meaning a more efficient use of resources that is able to detect and relieve any bottlenecks by adjusting the voltage if needed. Finally, some may be pleased to know that the new on-die thermal sensors around the CPU and GPU cores are also used to give a more accurate temperature reading, a much needed improvement over most of AMDs processors in recent years.
Test Setup
A85X Setup
Motherboard – GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4
RAM – Xtreem LV PC3 19200 DDR3 LV 2400
SSD – Kingston Hyper X 120GB
Power Supply – NZXT Hale82 650W
Cooler – Stock
Motherboard – GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4
RAM – Xtreem LV PC3 19200 DDR3 LV 2400
SSD – Kingston Hyper X 120GB
Power Supply – NZXT Hale82 650W
Cooler – Stock
APU Configurations
A10-6800K @ 4.1 GHz/4.4 GHz (100MHz x 41/44. 1333 MHz 9-9-9-24)
HD 8670D integrated graphics @ 844 MHz (OC @ 950 MHz, 2400 MHz 11-11-11-28)
A8-5600K @ 3.6GHz/3.9 GHz (100MHz x 36/39, 1333 MHz 9-9-9-24)
HD 7660D integrated graphics @ 760 MHz
Overclocking
Due to the architecture being near identical to what we have seen in the ‘Trinity’ based APUs, similar performance is to be expected, so we have taken a different approach to the overclocking of the A10-6800K which was to aim for the best performance on the stock cooling solution. This has practical implications due to the popularity of small form factor system builds, as well as ‘out the box’ potential without spending extra on a cooling solution (maybe to allow for the purchase of some higher performance memory).
Attempting an overclock is fairly simple with the unlocked APUs however, using 1.41V with the CPU @ 4.4GHz, there was a fair bit of heat and noise to be experienced, considering the marginal performance gains from the CPU I felt that using stock cooling solutions it would be wise to focus on GPU gain over CPU gain.
Cool n’ Quiet at work
Turbo Core doing its job
GPU gains can be fairly significant, previously APUs have been able to achieve around 1 GHz on the core speed and the A10-6800K is no exception. Booting in at 1013 MHz bumping NB voltage to 1.3V, however it proved unstable, this setting may prove stable given more time to play around. Knocking the clock speed down to 950 MHz, 106 MHz over stock, proved stable. Paired with the higher memory speed of 2400 MHz, some nice gains should be expected.
Stock GPU settings
GPU OC
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.
Using a SSD alone over traditional HDDs prove to lower system power usage by around 10-20W, however, the peak power consumption was surprisingly high from the A10-6800K. Even though this test measures the ‘peak system power draw’ under unrealistic loads, the peak was around 20w higher than the A8-5600K (and the A10-5800K using a HDD!) these variations could be down to differences in the Turbo Core and new voltage management. On the GPU OC testing, the peak power draw, comparatively, increased by a marginal 7W. Overclocking the CPU and GPU often tends to use a much larger power draw but because we just overclocked the GPU, combined with the higher stock CPU speeds, we may be able to achieve close to the full potential of the APU performance without wasting more power needlessly.
Synthetic Benchmarks: AIDA64
CPU Queen BenchmarkThis 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.
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.
The A10-6800K consistently tops the APU list at stock speeds.
Synthetic Benchmarks: Cinebench 11.5
CPU RenderingCINEBENCH 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.
Finally catching up to Llano out the box.
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.
Closely matched to the HD 7660D of the previous flagship, though the overclock on the HD 8670D results in ‘better than discrete’ performance.
Synthetic Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA
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.
Synthetic Benchmarks: 3DMark 11 & 3DMark – Fire Strike
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.
3DMark – Fire Strike
Fire Strike is our new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is our most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today. Fire Strike will only be available in the Windows editions of 3DMark initially.
In this test, we have compared the AMD A10-6800K APU against Intel’s latest and greatest found in their ‘Haswell’ CPUs, the HD 4600. For testing and reference purposes, we use 1333MHz memory frequency for the AMD APUs because it represents a ‘baseline’ of performance for mainstream DDR3. The Intel benchmark was tested using 1866MHz memory. Memory speed has a direct effect on iGPU performance because it is shared by the iGPU and CPU. Thus using slower memory frequency can bottleneck iGPU performance. For reference, the A10-6800K (officially rated for 2133MHz memory) scored 1045 in Fire Strike using 1866MHz memory frequency and the Overclocked result shows how much potential the HD 8670D has. Though it may outperform the Intel HD 4600, it is clear that Intel GPU technology is improving quickly.
Synthetic Benchmarks: UNIGINE Heaven 4.0 & Valley 1.0
UNIGINE Heaven 4.0
Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
UNIGINE Valley 1.0
Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.
Game Benchmarks: AVP, Deus Ex:HR, TESV, DiRT SD, DOTA 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.
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.
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.
DOTA 2
Dota is a competitive game of action and strategy, played both professionally and casually by millions of passionate fans worldwide. Players pick from a pool of over a hundred heroes, forming two teams of five players. Radiant heroes then battle their Dire counterparts to control a gorgeous fantasy landscape, waging campaigns of cunning, stealth, and outright warfare.
Irresistably colorful on the surface, Dota is a game of infinite depth and complexity. Every hero has an array of skills and abilities that combine with the skills of their allies in unexpected ways, to ensure that no game is ever remotely alike. This is one of the reasons that the Dota phenomenon has continued to grow.
Irresistably colorful on the surface, Dota is a game of infinite depth and complexity. Every hero has an array of skills and abilities that combine with the skills of their allies in unexpected ways, to ensure that no game is ever remotely alike. This is one of the reasons that the Dota phenomenon has continued to grow.
Conclusion
Looking over at the latest 6000 series APUs, it is easy to be underwhelmed due by the fact they are ‘just a refresh’. The primary benefit to the A10-6800K is the high out the box speeds, combined with a modest GPU overclock and some capable high performance memory the A10-6800K can give excellent gaming performance using just stock cooling, ideal for low profile and small form factor setups, not to mention that you will vastly improved performance per watt by not pumping the CPU with unnecessary voltage for minor gains.
Despite the claimed ‘better’ thermal monitoring, upon testing, this may not be of a benefit to overclockers. While internally it may be benefiting the APU by way of better power management and clock speeds, directly to the user, the thermal monitoring is just as useless as any other AMD chip from the past 5-10 years. Running various monitoring applications, including AMD’s own Overdrive software, we were greeted with the typical temperature range of -252°C to 90°C and anywhere in between. The GPU side of monitoring seemed to be around a stable 59°C though I would not like to be the one to report it on the side of ‘accurate’. This was disappointing as one may have expected thermal monitoring ‘improvements’ to be passed on to the end user directly.
The A10-6800K is ultimately a more expensive, better clocked, A10-5800K that has benefited from a maturing 32nm fabrication, that being said nothing has got ‘worse’ and considering that ‘Richland’ is a ‘refresh’ acting as a stop gap between ‘Trinity’ and the delayed ‘Kaveri’, it is understandable that some may be disappointed.
Offering good, balanced performance between CPU and GPU the A10-6800K is AMDs highest performing APU to date, perfect in the right situation. So we proudly present the AMD A10-6800K with our Vortez Silver.
Pros.
+ Little need to overclock CPU due to high Turbo Core speeds out the box
+ Discrete level integrated graphics
Cons.
– Little performance gain over previous generation
– Still using 32nm fab
+ Little need to overclock CPU due to high Turbo Core speeds out the box
+ Discrete level integrated graphics
Cons.
– Little performance gain over previous generation
– Still using 32nm fab
Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net. Thanks to AMD for providing today’s review sample.
