AMD A10-6800K and A10-6700 (Richland) Reviews

Performance Analysis

The update to Piledriver cores from the original Llano APUs actually appears to have caused a performance drop in certain benchmarks, including Cinebench and most notably WPrime, where the A8-3850 and A8-3870K results are still impressively high. Nevertheless, the A10-6700 performs almost identically to the Intel Core i3-3220, while the A10-6800K is able to outpace it a little. Intel's chip is less expensive, however, so it's not a great result, but the two new AMD chips do maintain healthy leads over their Trinity counterparts in these benchmarks. Overclocking also results in nice performance jumps, especially for the A10-6800K, while the overclocked A10-6700 marginally outpaces the A10-6800K at stock speeds.

Our image editing and video encoding tests again demonstrate the performance advantage the new APUs have over the Trinity ones. However, in the former, Intel has an easy lead, with the Ivy Bridge cores in the Core i3-3220 leaving it over 25 percent quicker than even the overclocked A10-6800K. The same Intel CPU has less of an advantage in the video encoding, however, as the A10-6800K performs on par with it, but it's still necessary to overclock the costlier APUs to put them ahead of the cheaper Ivy Bridge offering.

Moving to multi-tasking, the Richland APUs have roughly a 50 point lead over the equivalent Trinity ones. The core frequency of the chips seems to have a large impact in this test, however, as the overclocked parts see much more significant leaps in performance. Nevertheless, the Intel Core i3-3220 maintains an easy lead here again, and in fact the overall score shows it's 7 percent faster on average than even the overclocked flagship Richland part despite costing £20 less. On the plus side, the A10-6700 averages a 10 percent lead over the A10-5700, while the A10-6800K leads the A10-5800K by just under 6 percent, which is roughly what you'd expect given the clock speed increases.

Our 1,680 x 1,050 Left 4 Dead 2 test reveals small but noticeable improvements to framerates for both Richland APUs, as does the 1,920 x 1,080 run. The 1080p playthrough also shows Intel's onboard graphics solutions in Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge being left in the dust, as AMD's Radeon cores provide more than double the minimum frame rate of the former and over triple that of the latter. Sadly, we've not yet had a chance to test Haswell's capabilities here, but Intel evidently has its work cut out for it. Also, both Skyrim and Left 4 Dead 2 benefit at least a little from using faster memory kits. 8GB 2,133MHz memory can be had for just £15 more than 1,600MHz kits, so could be well worth the investment for budget gamers.

The power consumption figures are also pleasing. There wasn't any difference between Trinity and Richland in idle conditions, but under load both the new APUs drew less power than their counterparts while also performing better, so the Turbo Core improvements certainly seem to be effective. Naturally, however, the energy efficiency decreases rapidly when you overclock the chips.

Conclusion

As a relatively minor update to the existing range of APUs, Richland does what it needs to. It provides a small but clear performance boost across the board and, considering this, is priced appropriately, at least against Trinity parts. The lowered power consumption is also welcome, and the chips appear to have good overclocking potential too, although less exotic cooling might yield less fruitful results.

While the games we test with aren't the most demanding ones, they're enough to show the clear lead that Richland's onboard GPU has over that of Ivy Bridge in the same price range. However, Intel's offering is the clear victor in CPU bound performance, so if you're opting for any half decent discrete graphics card, a budget chip like the Core i3-3220 is the superior choice. If, on the other hand, your budget won't stretch to allow this, the Richland range is well priced for what it offers, which is adequate CPU performance and graphics hardware that should be more than capable of achieving playable frame rates on modern games (with the detail settings dialed down somewhat, of course), plus there the option to get double the performance by using Crossfire with a low-end discrete AMD graphics card.

If you're willing to wait, it's relatively safe to assume that the upcoming lower end Haswell parts will also offer very attractive CPU performance, and while LGA1155 parts are now slowly on the way out, the LGA1150 socket will also provide you with a solid platform for upgrades. FM2, on the other hand, is now at its performance limit with the A10-6800K, and is set to be replaced sooner rather than later by the FM2+ socket when the Kaveri APUs arrive, so regular upgraders are also better off on the Intel path for now.

With its all round improvements, Richland may be able to entice existing FM2 owners, especially those who opted for A8-series Trinity APUs. AMD may still have a lot of catching up to do with its high end processors, but Richland still makes for an attractive option for a new budget build too, as it achieves the best currently available balance between CPU and GPU performance for just over £100. Given their price parity, the A10-6700 should only be considered by those for whom low power consumption is a top priority, as otherwise the A10-6800K is the superior chip.