AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 1
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 27, 2012 12:00 AM ESTPortal 2
Portal 2 continues to be the latest and greatest Source engine game to come out of Valve's offices. While Source continues to be a DX9 engine, and hence is designed to allow games to be playable on a wide range of hardware, Valve has continued to upgrade it over the years to improve its quality, and combined with their choice of style you'd have a hard time telling it's over 7 years old at this point. From a rendering standpoint Portal 2 isn't particularly geometry heavy, but it does make plenty of use of shaders.
Portal 2 performance is one of the stronger showings for Trinity. In both of these tests we're seeing aorund a 28% increase in performance compared to the A8-3870K. Ivy Bridge doesn't stand a chance as the A10-5800K is more than twice as fast as Intel's HD 4000.
Battlefield 3
Its popularity aside, Battlefield 3 may be the most interesting game in our benchmark suite for a single reason: it was the first AAA DX10+ game. Consequently it makes no attempt to shy away from pushing the graphics envelope, and pushing GPUs to their limits at the same time. Even at low settings Battlefield 3 is a handful, and to be able to run it on an iGPU would no doubt make quite a few traveling gamers happy.
We're back down to more modest gains in our Battlefield 3 test: Trinity shows a 15% increase in performance compared to Llano at the high end. The advantage compared to Intel remains healthy at over 50%.
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leexgx - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
T** Hardware i have made sure i never goto there web site again (even saying there website name as google counts that towards stats)most stuff on there cant be trusted
blackmagnum - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
I hope AMD aim their products for first place in the best price/ performance race with Intel. This seems the only way they will be bought other than for the health of competition or nostalgic sense of pity.duploxxx - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
pity for what? do you really think you need more CPU perfromance then a Piledriver core deliver? Do you really think that the Trinity isn't good enough power consumption wise.Its fools who believe they need an i7 to run daily desktop usage. spend the wasted money of an i7 on a fast disc (SSD) and your overall platform experience and performance will be much higher then your so called fixed brand name.
daos - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
are you serious? people use computers for more than "daily desktop usage". Video editing, graphics design, multi-threaded apps, benchmarking, even gaming...Every bit counts the larger the scale. CPUs can make a huge difference in all of the above mentioned except for maybe gaming unless at an enormous resolution like I am.
And you have to remember that everything is relative. You are concerned with wasting your money whereas the next guy could care less about an extra 2 or 3 hundred dollars for the best. Thats a drop in the bucket for him. Hell, thousands more can be a drop in the bucket if the best is what your after...its simple. Go Intel.
dagamer34 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
When the average selling price of a computer is $450 in the US, I don't see how that really includes any of the things you listed above.Alexvrb - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Heck, for most people, a Tegra 3 or similar in a tablet is enough computing power. A lot of people just stroll into a store and buy the advertised on-sale laptop for $300-400. For these people an APU might not be a bad choice, given that the lower-end Intel chips all have horribly crippled GPUs.lwatcdr - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
"Video editing, graphics design, multi-threaded apps, benchmarking, even gaming..."Some do but more and more of those tasks really benifit from a GPU boost. Most Adobe products now use openCL so they can take advantage of the GPU. That will cover Video editing, graphics design and gaming. multi-trheaded apps benifit more form core count than raw cpu and most multi-threaded apps will do just fine on th A10.
Benchmarking? Really that is called a hobby unless you are doing it to test systems for a living. You do not buy hardware just to bet a higher benchmark score you Benchmark hardware to find the cheapest way to get a task done in a reasonable amount of time. Anything else is a hobby and while that is all fine and good it is a tiny fringe element of a fraction of a percentage of the PC market.
Denithor - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
But this is the desktop market. It's simply too easy to install a discrete GPU that is tons faster than any iGPU, even this new Trinity. Integrated GPU just doesn't cut it for most of those applications.Maybe for an HTPC. But that's honestly the only place I'd even consider pointing anyone toward an APU over a CPU+GPU.
chrnochime - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
There are always people who make stupid blanket statements like yours. "People" would mean everyone. You not writing "some" in there basically means you think everyone think the way you do. If that were not the case your sentence would not have been written that way.Don't like my nitpicking? Don't write stupid blanket statements then.
mikato - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link
what do you mean "you people"?