AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 1
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 27, 2012 12:00 AM ESTStarcraft 2
Our next game is Starcraft II, Blizzard's 2010 RTS megahit. Starcraft II is a DX9 game that is designed to run on a wide range of hardware, and given the growth in GPU performance over the years it's often CPU limited before it's GPU limited on higher-end cards.
Despite being heavily influenced by CPU performance, Starcraft 2 shows big gains when moving to Trinity. The improvement over Llano ranges from 16 - 27% in our tests. The performance advantage over Ivy Bridge is huge.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Bethesda's epic sword & magic game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is our RPG of choice for benchmarking. It's altogether a good CPU benchmark thanks to its complex scripting and AI, but it also can end up pushing a large number of fairly complex models and effects at once. This is a DX9 game so it isn't utilizing any new DX11 functionality, but it can still be a demanding game.
We see some mild improvements over Llano in our Skyrim tests, and even Intel is able to catch up a bit. Trinity still does quite well, only NVIDIA's GeForce GT 640 can really deliver better performance than the top-end A10-5800K SKU.
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ganeshts - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Yes, they can be used simutaneouslymikato - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link
Eyefinity!MrSpadge - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Seeing how the A10-something has 1.5 times the raw GPU horse power than the A8-something it seems obvious that the A10 is badly choked for memory bandwidth, even at DDR3-1866. Since even DDR3-2400 ist rather cheap these days it would be interesting to see performance scaling with memory speed. I expect the value the A10 provides can be considerably increased.rscoot - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Wondering if the IMC is rated for DDR3-2400 though. And yeah it's patently obvious that the APU on these chips are starved for memory bandwidth.wwwcd - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Intel HD 4000, looks like a wrist of gay, against the presentation of graphics controllers set in Trinity ;)formulav8 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
This preview showed me how pathetic Intels junk is. Doesn't even come close overall.Aone - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Would you say what cpu you used for GT 640?wheeqo - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
AMD please take Trinity to Windows 8 Tablet!Roland00Address - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
but is it possible for you to add these three cards before the final review next week1) 6670 1gb gddr5
2) 6570 ddr3 or 6670 ddr3
3) 7750 1gb gddr5
I ask for these are new cards that trinity will be competing against in a similar price bracket. You can't find a 5570 on neweeg right now since it has been discontinued and replaced with 6000 and 7000 series part. The only 5570 on newegg right now is a proprietary one from visiontek with a custom output that has a dongle that allows it to do 4 monitors in a low profile slot.
Thank You
herrdoktor330 - Friday, September 28, 2012 - link
To add on to this one, can you test the APU with those cards IN CROSSFIRE?I seriously think that you could get decent enough HD gaming from this setup with some eye candy with a little help from a discrete GPU. I've been waiting on this platform for a while and, while the CPU performance will be similar to the mobile variant (thus underwhelming), this APU is going to be awesome for the HTPC that's also gaming capable.