The AMD A8-7670K APU Review: Aiming for Rocket League
by Ian Cutress on November 18, 2015 8:00 AM ESTOffice Performance
The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can cause concern in environments with variably-threaded workloads. There is also an added issue of the motherboard remaining consistent, depending on how the motherboard manufacturer wants to add in their own boosting technologies over the ones that Intel would prefer they used. In order to remain consistent, we implement an OS-level unique high-performance mode on all the CPUs we test, which should override any motherboard manufacturer performance mode.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single-thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that ray traces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single-core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.
All AMD CPUs performed similarly here.
WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2,867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52GB – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30-second 720p videos.
WinRAR is all about threads and DRAM speed, so the CPUs that can support higher DRAM frequencies get a boost.
3D Particle Movement
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC win in the single-thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads, and loves more cores.
Again, all AMD CPUs seem to perform similarly in 3DPM for single-thread mode, indicating that something more fundamental about the design is a bottleneck.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test, we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats, and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and results are given in seconds.
Single-thread frequency and IPC win here.
Web Benchmarks
On the lower-end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of Web browsing. For our Web benchmarks, we take four well-known tests with Chrome 35 as a consistent browser.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
WebXPRT
Google Octane v2
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
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AS118 - Wednesday, November 18, 2015 - link
Well to be fair, the FX chips are strong enough and cheap (especially the $100 FX-6300) and you can pair them with a discrete GPU with ease. If you're trying to get a 1080p gaming rig for absolute cheapest price, a double AMD FX / GPU build works pretty well.That said, next year with Zen on 14nm will probably give people a good reason to get AMD. I just support AMD whenever I can because I dislike monopolies, and don't want Nvidia and Intel to become ones.
Sure they give good price for performance NOW, but that's because they have AMD to compete with them. If they didn't, I doubt the price would be "only a little higher" than AMD.
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, November 18, 2015 - link
8320E at $110 at Microcenter with UD3P 2.0 board is the best deal.JoeMonco - Wednesday, November 18, 2015 - link
"That said, next year with Zen on 14nm will probably give people a good reason to get AMD."Yeah, yeah. We hear this ever time a new AMD microarchitecture comes out and yet not a single one has lived up to the hype in more than a decade.
medi03 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
Do you get paid to spread FUD about AMD or is it for free?JoeMonco - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
How can facts be "FUD"? If I'm wrong, please do tell which AMD CPU has been able to beat Intel in anything performance or TDP-wise since the Core2 from 2006. I won't hold my breath, though, since you'll just sling ad homs with no real facts.Deshi - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link
Yes, and that would be because only one new architecture (buldozer and its many variants) has been released in that past Decade, and we all know how that played out. Before that Athlon actually beat Intel for a good amount of time, and the same guy that worked on that is working on Zen. I'm somewhat hopeful that it won't be a bad design decision this time. I'm just hopeing its not too late. back in Athlon days, Intel was too pridefull and choose to ignore AMD initially, which is why AMD was able to take so much market share from them. I don't expect Intel to make the same mistake again this time.alistair.brogan - Wednesday, November 18, 2015 - link
This review doesn't compare with the new Pentium G4500. Skylake Pentium CPU cores with i5 Skylake integrated graphics. Faster and 1/3 the electricity/heat compared with the AMD APU. Only advantage amd has left is how some newer games don't run right without quad core, as they are bad ports from consoles....alistair.brogan - Wednesday, November 18, 2015 - link
50 dollars cheaper too, in Canadaalistair.brogan - Wednesday, November 18, 2015 - link
40-50 fps borderlands 2 on minimum settings (30-40 ultra settings) with HD 530 and the G4500Ian Cutress - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
As posted above, we don't have any of the other Skylake processors in yet. Benchmarking is always an iterative task - with limited space and resources you can't all benchmark them on the same day.But sure, if I could get all the processors in on day one, I would totally try test them all for comparion points.
Come back when/if we test the G4500 and see the numbers then.
And no, it's not a simple case of going out and buying this one SKU just for the niche comparison that you're interested in - there have been requests in the comment sections of reviews for other SKUs as well, and I've had a couple of emails for more SKUs on top of that.
Some SKUs are region limited (or slow roll out), or others are OEM only, so it can be hard to source outside the usual channels. So let me try and talk to Intel so we can get them all in, and then go from there. It's never an issue of lack of interest or subversion, just procurement (and ensuring we can communicate with the manufacturer at the point of testing).
Of course, the more readers that register their interest, the more I can pass it on up the chain to get them in.