AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 2
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 2, 2012 1:45 AM ESTOverclocking
With Sandy Bridge Intel killed budget overclocking by completely clock locking all CPUs without turbo boost enabled. While you used to be able to buy an entry level CPU and overclock it quite nicely, Intel moved all overclocking to its higher priced parts. As a gift to the overclocking community, Intel ramped up the presence of its fully unlocked K-series parts. Anything with a K at the end shipped with a fully unlocked clock multiplier, at a small price premium. Given that Intel hadn't shipped unlocked CPUs since the days of the original Pentium, this was a welcome move on its part. What would really be nice is the addition of some lower priced K SKUs, unfortunatley we won't get that unless there's significant competitive pressure from AMD.
Trinity doesn't have what it takes to really force Intel into doing such a thing, but that doesn't mean AMD won't try. The Trinity lineup includes AMD's own K-series SKUs that, like their Intel counterparts, ship fully unlocked. From $67 all the way up to $122, AMD is offering unlocked Trinity APUs. The value of these parts really depends on just how overclockable Trinity is to begin with. The Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture is designed to push frequency, however AMD is already shipping these things at very close to 4GHz to begin with. Take AMD's turbo frequencies into account and you're already at 4.2GHz with the A10-5800K. How much additional headroom is there?
With a stock cooler and not a ton of additional voltage, it looks like there's another 5 - 15% depending on whether you're comparing base clocks or max turbo clocks. With an extra 0.125V (above the 1.45V standard core voltage setting) I was able to hit 4.4GHz on the A10-5800K. I could boot into Windows at 4.5GHz however the system wasn't stable. Although I could post at 4.6GHz, Windows was highly unstable at that frequency. With more exotic cooling I do believe I could probably make 4.5 work on the A10-5800K.
The extra frequency isn't enough to erase the single threaded performance gap between the A10 and Intel's Core i3 3220 however:
The only way AMD is going to close this gap is through a serious focus on improving single threaded performance in future architectures.
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Spunjji - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
That seems to be a big if rather than a matter of when, though, given the patchy support that's been forthcoming for QuickSync so far! So possibly a valid avenue of investigation anyway. :)eBombzor - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Am I missing something in the benchmarks? Tom's did a CPU comparison with the 2100 and the 8120 (which isn't a whole lot different from the 8150) and the 8120 is near the Phenom CPU gaming wise.http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pent...
Something is not right here, the 2100 dominated the 8120 in Tom's benchies, the 3220 should be better.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Just thumbing through Tom's article, it looks like they're using 1920x1080 with high quality settings (GPU-limited settings) while we're mostly using 1024 and 1680 in order to ensure we're CPU-limited.Rezurecta - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
Who cares about CPU limiting? You're not going to play a game @ 1024. 1680 might be valid, but why not show benchmarks at 1920? It just doesn't make sense to show a benchmark that isn't at a major demographic point.It could be a very misleading benchmark for a substantial amount of readers.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
But it makes amd look better, so it's awesome, and irresistible.Rand - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Why was the overclocking test done on Windows 8 (Image shows Win8), while the performance testing was done on Windows 7 (Test setup lists Win7)?nofumble62 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
This Trinity performance didn't beat i3, let alone i5.AMD statement " i5 performance at i3 price" is a total lie.
ac2 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
It's only true for heavily threaded integer work and AES...But yeah, disappointing...
Taft12 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
... and gaming on the integrated GPUMySchizoBuddy - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Legit reviews state that AMD advised them to disable turbo mode else it will throttle the overclock. They were able to overclock it to 4.6 with full stability using a larger cooler.http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2047/18/