AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 2
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 2, 2012 1:45 AM EST
Content Creation Performance
Adobe Photoshop CS4
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
Our Photoshop workload still runs better on Intel hardware, but the gap in performance between the 5800K and 3220 is smaller than it was between the FX-8150 and 2500K last year. While Bulldozer was pretty much unrecommendable, Trinity approaches tradeoff territory.
3dsmax 9 & POV-ray
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores.
Once again in a heavily threaded FP benchmark, the A10 and Core i3 perform very similarly. POV-Ray is another example of this below:
File Compression/Decompression Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
Our multithreaded Par2 recovery test shows AMD with a small advantage over the Core i3 3220, although it obviously can't touch any of the more expensive quad-core parts.
Excel Math Performance
Not all heavily threaded FP applications are easy wins for AMD. In our Monte Carlo simulation benchmark the 3220 manages a decent lead over the A10-5800K.
Our old Sorenson Squeeze test is one area where we see a slight regression compared to Llano. Like I mentioned earlier, this isn't super common but it does happen from time to time given the dramatic architecture difference between Llano and Trinity.
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mikato - Wednesday, October 03, 2012 - link
Well said. I would also like to point out that Angry Birds and Words With Friends are also "modern games". Replyvegemeister - Wednesday, October 03, 2012 - link
1. Gaming: Look at those benchmarks. Low settings, punk-ass resolution, no AA, and STILL DROPPING FRAMES.HTPC: there are two kinds pf CPUs for HTPC: those that can decode 10 bit h.264 at 1920x1080 in real time, and those that cannot. Unfortunately, this review doesn't have benchmarks for that. Reply
iTzSnypah - Tuesday, October 02, 2012 - link
The A4-5300 looks promising for its price and intended use. I keep telling my brother that he really needs to upgrade his computer (8 year old HP with Single-core AMD Athlon X64) and the A4-5300 looks like it would fit his needs perfectly. I get tired of going to his house and waiting 5 minutes to open the internet. Also only being able to watch 360/480p (depending on the 'mood' of the computer) is beyond annoying. Its his birthday this month so I might surprise him. ReplyHubb1e - Tuesday, October 02, 2012 - link
I have a single core Athlon64 at 2.4 ghz that works just fine. The problem is a lack of ram, slow hard drive, OS bloat, and a lack of GPU acceleration for youtube. I have 1.5GB of memory and a good video card that offloads youtube and the single core computer runs pretty well. I am constantly amazed at how well it works for casual use.But yeah, an upgrade could be in order but I'd argue the Celeron G530 would be a better choice. Anand tests the Pentium and it actually beats the A10 in some benches. The G530 is still a full dual core CPU and is only a few mhz slower. The A4 drops a whole module and in benches on Toms looks pretty slow. Reply
Jamahl - Tuesday, October 02, 2012 - link
Where was the A4 benched on Tom's? From what I can tell the A6-5400K is drawing very close to the 3870K in gaming. The A4 will be further behind but it'll still be up with say, the triple core A6-3500 performance imo. ReplyAnanke - Tuesday, October 02, 2012 - link
These are great for OEM, the 95% of the PC market :). You know, what people are buying from HP, Dell, Lenovo etc.Enthusiasts will probably not be appealed by Trinity, but enthusiasts are very small market. Reply
wenbo - Tuesday, October 02, 2012 - link
Enthusiasts are very small market, but they are very VERBAL :) Replyvegemeister - Tuesday, October 02, 2012 - link
I see that you are planning to move to a newer version of x264 for benchmarking. Since direct comparisons are going to be invalidated anyway, why not go ahead and move to a crf encode like everyone else not stuck in the last decade?2-pass does not compress any more effectively than 1-pass. The only reason to use it is to get very close to a particular file size. x264 is much better than you at deciding how many bits it needs for acceptable quality on a particular file. These days, most people store their video on media far larger than a single file. It no longer makes sense to benchmark the use case of sqeezing as much quality as possible out of 700 MB. Reply
wenbo - Tuesday, October 02, 2012 - link
I think for real enthusiasts building a gaming PC is going to cost 750 to 850 dollars + what ever display you buy. AMD's FX-8150 seems to be really good. it's currently sold for 189 dollars less 20 promotion. And the combo is $502.00 + about 200 graphics and 100 SSD + 30 dollar fan give an acceptable gaming PC for less than 850 (with some savings power supply and case give you about $70 off, which means a total of $780) And an equivalent Intel I5, you pay for non-usable HD graphics is going to be about 50 to 70 dollars more expensive (on the processor and motherboard).The difference is on processor is really not that much without much of a promotion on A10-5800K, $169 vs $122. The savings would be on graphics, the best one you can get is HD6670 (I think you can only hybrid crossfire on this), which is $70 after rebate. So the difference is about 180 dollars. and motherboard is cheaper, at 80 dollars, That means you have an entry level gaming PC for a little more than $600 ($607 according to above numbers).
With similar configuration getting a intel i3-2100 is 119.99 at newegg + 129.99 motherboard + 70 graphics + 150ssd + 50 case + 50 power + 55 memory gives you 624.98 ( you don't need a fan, because you CANNOT overclock i3s).
So there is really not much of a difference. Reply
wenbo - Tuesday, October 02, 2012 - link
It would be good to know the price for each of the PC build that was bench marked. Reply