AMD A10-7800 Review: Testing the A10 65W Kaveri
by Ian Cutress on July 31, 2014 8:00 AM ESTGaming and Synthetics on Processor Graphics
The faster processor graphics become, the more of the low end graphics market is consumed - if the integrated graphics are better than a $50 discrete GPU, there ends up being no reason to buy a discrete GPU. This might seem a little odd for AMD, who also have a discrete GPU business. The counter argument is that integrated graphics is only comparable to low-end GPUs, which are historically low margin parts and thus might encourage users to invest in larger GPUs, especially as demands in resolution and graphical eye-candy increase. The compute side is also important, and the homologation of discrete to integrated graphics architectures helps software optimised for one also be accelerated on the other.
F1 2013
Bioshock Infinite
Tomb Raider
Sleeping Dogs
Company of Heroes 2
CompuBench 1.5
CompuBench is a new addition to our CPU benchmark suite, and as such we have only tested it on the following processors. The software uses OpenCL commands to process parallel information for a range of tests, and we use the flow management and particle simulation benchmarks here.
3DMark Fire Strike
The simple answer is this: for anything related to processor graphics, AMD's Kaveri wins hands down and by a large margin in the same power envelope for cheaper.
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r3loaded - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Conclusion: Unless you absolutely need fast, integrated graphics, a cheap Haswell will stick kick AMD's ass.Creig - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
What Haswell system will keep up with Kaveri at the same price point?Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
A10-7800 - $150FM2+ - $50 (maybe a Hudson D2 if you're lucky)
G3220 - $60
LGA1150 H87 mATX - $42
R7 260X - $100
Sorry, that won't "keep up" with Kaveri - it will WRECK it.
Flunk - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
You're right, blowhard. It would crush it, except in CPU multithreaded benchmarks... But who cares about that?The funniest thing about this build is that AMD products still soak up the majority of the budget.
silverblue - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
There are some instances that having a 2C/2T CPU will begin to make less and less sense as time goes on; for example, BF4 performance is reduced compared to the i3s and especially so compared to the i5s/i7s, but whilst this may become more and more common as time goes on with newer engines, there's still plenty of titles that a Pentium will shine in. However, will the frame latencies be acceptable? The following article does pose some interesting questions...http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2...
FriendlyUser - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I think you are right. The 4-core processors are way more future-proof. Single-thread performance has been very important but has also stagnated. Plus, we all know that the consoles are multi-core machines and game programmers will have to work with well-threaded engines.silverblue - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
It's one of those situations where the more threaded an engine becomes, the more Kaveri should outperform Piledriver due to not having the decoder switching between threads all the time. Piledriver's saving grace is clock speeds, but if AMD was to be able to release a Kaveri refresh, I'm sure they'd have mastered the 28nm process by then and be able to get a bit more speed out for the same power.Computer Bottleneck - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I liked article a lot. The author makes a good point about cpu to gpu balance.Therefore, if frame time variance will be examined in the future with 2C/2T processors I would hope appropriately sized discrete cards would be used. Maybe R7 260X or smaller (at suitably low resolution and detail settings) is a good starting point for testing 2C/2T processors in the future?
kmmatney - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
If you lower the budget (take out the graphics card) you can get an A8 6600K + MB for $99.99 at Microcenter. For light gaming this will way outperform the Intel solution with IGP, anf be plenty good enough for all other uses.kmmatney - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I'll admit - if you don't have a local Microcenter near you (I have one in Denver) then it's harder to go AMD.