The Kaveri Refresh 'Godavari' Review: Testing AMD's A10-7870K
by Ian Cutress on June 1, 2015 11:59 AM ESTProfessional Performance: Windows
Agisoft Photoscan – 2D to 3D Image Manipulation: link
Agisoft Photoscan creates 3D models from 2D images, a process which is very computationally expensive. The algorithm is split into four distinct phases, and different phases of the model reconstruction require either fast memory, fast IPC, more cores, or even OpenCL compute devices to hand. Agisoft supplied us with a special version of the software to script the process, where we take 50 images of a stately home and convert it into a medium quality model. This benchmark typically takes around 15-20 minutes on a high end PC on the CPU alone, with GPUs reducing the time.
Cinebench R15
Cinebench is a benchmark based around Cinema 4D, and is fairly well known among enthusiasts for stressing the CPU for a provided workload. Results are given as a score, where higher is better.
HandBrake v0.9.9: link
For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Hybrid x265
Hybrid is a new benchmark, where we take a 4K 1500 frame video and convert it into an x265 format without audio. Results are given in frames per second.
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nikaldro - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
"IT'S CORE COUNT I TELL YOU!!! NOW GO AND BUY THAT XEON E7! GREAT VALUE!!!!"Crunchy005 - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Outside of CPU results the Gaming results are all over the place. The 7700k beats out the 7870k sometimes and the APUs beat our the i5 at times. There is so much difference between games at the low end it's ridiculous.Lolimaster - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Outside of some results I think the 7870K gpu boost is bottlenecked by DDR3 bandwith, how about testing the 7850K/7870K both with 2133 and 2400/2600 DDR3.Pissedoffyouth - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Sorry to be a pain, but I think you meant GDDR5 rather than GDDR3 on the first page.LarsBars - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Great review, great coverage. I've been looking over the smorgasbord of leaks for the past few weeks wondering what is real and what is fake. Thanks for your high standards in tech reporting.Shadowmaster625 - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Clearly there is something wrong, since a supposedly faster chip comes in slower on many benchmarks. Sunspider being the most egregious offender. Perhaps the instructions used in the sunspider benchmark cost a lot of power, which leads to even more pronounced throttling. At any rate, why is this throttling not mentioned in the article? What about the crazy high stock voltages? Very disappointing to say the least.dreamcat4 - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Regardless of the CPU it's the GTX 750ti you want and not the plain GTX 750.Also - there's no big issue to buy the Pentium if the CPU is socketed LGA1150. Then you can always upgrade it later on to something better / faster.
nikaldro - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Pentium + 750ti would cost quite a bit more than the APU, even considering a cheap H81 mobofrozentundra123456 - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Ehh, HD7770 has 25% more shaders than Kaveri, faster clock, and better bandwidth. So I would expect about 50% faster than Kaveri, and GTX750 (non-Ti) is still faster than HD7770. So 750 non-Ti is still a vast improvement over the igpu of Kaveri. If you are really budget limited and dont want a non-HT dual core, the Athlon X4 860k plus HD7770 or GTX750 will give far superior performance to an APU. Despite the repeated arguments in the gpu forums by AMD fans, you have to work really hard to construct a scenario in which an APU makes sense for gaming compared to a cheap cpu (pentuim, Athlon X4, or FX 6300) plus a hundred dollar discrete card.dreamcat4 - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Right. There are lower levels than the 750Ti. But it's always worth it and best to pay extra for 750Ti version. Because it's got a *significantly* better (non-marginal) price / performance ratio over the lower slots of GTX 750, 740, or 730. Making the 750Ti always best value choice amongst those.AMD APU only makes sense for certain low-to-midrange mobo upgrades. E.g. just upgrading only the mobo+CPU only. And regardless of that possibility the AMD is never going to be as power performant (the TDPs). Which does still matter, the fan noise, case thermals, throttling etc.
The more other components you upgrade at same time (e.g. PSU, case, monitor etc). Then the less money is being saved with APU route = diminishing returns. And it's really not typical to 'just upgrade only the mobo+cpu' without also replacing other components too. Often monitor, storage, ram. So most times that puts all of these AMD APUs in some kind of a general 'grey area'. And that's being nice about it, ignoring both the higher TDP and also the poorer single-threaded performance.