FRONTPAGE AMD Richland A10-6800K APU Review

Thanks for the great review! I have been thinking about picking one of these apu rigs just to play around with. Did you try to push your memory to see how fast you could get it?

Hi xsuperbgx,
The more you overclock the CPU side, the lower you will have to set the memory. The motherboard I used for the review had a BIOS selectable memory speed of up to 2400 MHz, and it runs fine at that speed with the CPU at stock speed, although the CPU overclocking suffers when set that high.

This is a pretty nice chip when all is said and done. Thanks for your review, well done.

I've been pondering an HTPC re-build around something like this. Your opinion?

So, on Haswell, core clocks are primary over memory clocks.

If you're using the iGPU on Richland though, would you benefit more from core clock or memory speed?

Edit: No higher hybrid crossfire card? *Insert sadface here*

Lvcoyote said:

Hi xsuperbgx,
The more you overclock the CPU side, the lower you will have to set the memory. The motherboard I used for the review had a BIOS selectable memory speed of up to 2400 MHz, and it runs fine at that speed with the CPU at stock speed, although the CPU overclocking suffers when set that high.

Click to expand...

Do you feel that this limitation is due to temperatures or some kind of power limiting function?

Here is a youtube link showing 3dmark11 and windows index rating for the 4770k 3.5ghz Haswell. Not overclocked.

This is around 10-30fps slower than the 6800k in most games. And almost twice the price!!
Link to yoube video:

@Robert17 - Depending on what demands you put on a HTPC I think it would be a good choice. For media playback it would work great, but if you do heavy gaming at high resolutions a discrete video card might be in order.

@ATMINSIDE - The iGPU shares the system memory, so naturally you would benefit from higher memory speeds as far as that side of things go. The iGPU overclocked pretty well in it's own right too.

@xsuperbgx - IMC limitation most likely.

Nice review Dino,

The only thing I think would be good to see is what settings for the games would provide a playable framerate (if it was possible).

majorleague said:

Here is a youtube link showing 3dmark11 and windows index rating for the 4770k 3.5ghz Haswell. Not overclocked.

This is around 10-30fps slower than the 6800k in most games. And almost twice the price!!
Link to yoube video:

Click to expand...

Haswell isn't in the same product class as AMD's apu's are. Haswells top end chips are not only out of the price range, but they are also target at much higher integer performance. They also have l3 cache, something that is dropped from APU's in the interest of reduced manufacturing cost.

As for these new apu's

The real question is what is the new norm for performance gonna be. With the 5800k's with a good aftermarket cooler you routinely could push to around 1200mhz iGPU. While 2400mhz on memory was out of the questions for chips that where not of a high quality bin level. 2300mhz in most situations was not. 2800-3000mhz was not unheard of running single stick under a cold chip either.

Some might of complained about the core temp montioring on earlier apu's I had pretty much just learned to deal with it, since it wasn't to different compared to dealing with some of the more temperamental phenoms out there. 4600-4800 was considering to be core norm for a high quality 5800k with after market cooling before. So if that holds true with the new revision hopefully we see 4900-5100 on air. Then cold performance of 5500-5800 on phase change. Speculation of course.

The biggest OC problem still with these chips will still bethe a85x chipset. Thats still gonna cause major limitations. Due to its unstable PLL clockspeed. Till that gets fixed its gonna continue to be somewhat of a pain in the butt when really pushing these chips.

Gonna try to pick one up soon, since my inbox is already blowing up with "have you played with these yet".