AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 2
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 2, 2012 1:45 AM ESTPower Consumption
Intel has a full process node advantage when you compare Ivy Bridge and Trinity, as a result of that plus an architectural efficiency advantage you just get much better power consumption from the Core i3 than you do with Trinity. Idle power is very good but under heavy CPU load Trinity consumes considerably more power. You're basically looking at quad-core Ivy Bridge levels of power usage under load but performance closer to that of a dual-core Ivy Bridge. AMD really needs a lot of design level efficiency improvements to get power consumption under control. Compared to Llano, Trinity is a bit more efficient it seems so there's an actual improvement there.
Of course on the processor graphics side the story is much closer with Trinity being a bit more power hungry than Ivy Bridge, but not nearly by this margin.
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ditroia - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Hi Does anyone know what the highest end Radeon GPU I can use to Crossfire with the 7 Series GPU on the APU?Thanks in Advance
Dave
Roland00Address - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Cards you can do crossfire with the integrated graphics are as followsIf you buy itself
6450, 6570, 6670
If you get it prebuilt (these are the same gpus as above but they have a 1000 added to the number for that is what hp, dell, acer convinced amd to do for bigger numbers sell).
7450, 7570, 7670
That said you might want to do your research on asymmetric crossfire before hand, based on other websites reviews that tested it you are only going to get 30 to 60 percent scaling and the 7700 series cards are usually faster than the asymmetric crossfire.
ditroia - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Disappointing that you can't crossfire with a & series Discrete 7 series GPU, as I think that would have made a cheap but powerful Gaming system.Thanks
mikato - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
Yeah I was really hoping to see a Crossfire with a lower end card as part of this review.Jamahl - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Llano vs the 2105 last year -http://www.anandtech.com/show/4476/amd-a83850-revi...
"Look at our single-threaded Cinebench scores below and you'll see a 50% performance advantage."
"CPU bound gaming performance is also an area where the A8 falls behind the i3. Here you're looking at a 25 - 50% advantage for the i3-2100/2105"
This is partly due to Ivy Bridge being so underwhelming.
The only problem I see is with load power which has gone backwards.
JKnows - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Video Drivers: AMD Catalyst 12.3 ???Are you kidding? That driver cannot even use Trinity architecture...
aislanluiz - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
We’re power users, after all. We know how to cope with heat and noise; we can deal with a 100 W chip, even in an HTPC. But there’s no way to make the Core i3 look better unless you spring for an add-in card. AMD’s emphasis on balance makes the A10-5800K a better platform for more people than Intel’s closest competition.frozentundra123456 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Trinity may be attractive for HTPC, but I cannot imagine a "power user" who does not have a discrete card in a desktop, at least if you are at all into gaming. The igpus are pathetic for gaming and you get better performance with intel plus discrete card.ericore - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
I don't think Anand has a single benchmark that uses an App from AMD appStore. Even Tom's hardware was considerate enough to use Adobe CS6 products. I'm sorry but this benchmark makes Intel look better than it does. The benchmark is fully Intel optimized, System Max is Intel Optimized, no a single benchmark is AMD optimized. Disappointed Anand.The following review is much more fair:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-5800k-a8-5...
Beenthere - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
The haters won't be happy but it's great that AMD has delivered as promised with Trinity desktop in addition to laptop. Trinity desktop delivers performance and value for those looking for an all-in-one solution at an extremely affordable price - which is a growing segment of the market as people discover the huge cost savings compared to a discrete CPU/GPU set-up. BTW, no one would ever consider Intel 2500 graphics as being usable, so the Trinity desktop APUs are literally in a class of their own for now.It's also worth noting that single thread performance is not the holy grail. Most people running modern software will be perfectly happy with Trinity desktop performance even if you crunch numbers now and then. Price and performance wise AMD has delivered a winning solution when you look at performance vs. cost. This will force Intel to discount it's i3/i5 products, which is good for all.
Obviously Trinity desktop is NOT intended as a replacement for a highend discrete CPU/GPU system. That will come in a few more years but for now AMD continues to offer excellent performance and value, which is what mainstream consumers desire.