AMD A10-7800 “Kaveri” APU Review

Introduction & What’s New?

In January 2014 AMD unveiled its latest generation of accelerated processing units dubbed “Kaveri”. The range was formed of the A10-7850K flagship, the A10-7700K mid-range part and the entry level & low power A8-7600. Back in February I conducted a comprehensive performance analysis of all the released Kaveri APUs. In short, I found them all to be very interesting but I was most impressed by the A8-7600. The reason for this is that it offered a solid amount of performance for its thermal envelope and price, overall the A8-7600 seems ideal for anyone building a multi-use entry level system. The configurable TDP option, of between 45 to 65W, also makes the A8-7600 a great choice for a wide variety of form factors: such as HTPCs, fanless systems and so on. AMD’s A8-7600 is only getting launched now, despite being paper-launched back in January. Alongside the launch of the A8-7600 AMD is also releasing a new APU, the A10-7800 – which is what we are testing in this review. The A10-7800 will be physically identical to the A10-7850K except it does not come with an unlocked option. The main reason for that is that the A10-7800 is optimised for low power and has the configurable TDP of 45-65W like the A8-7600 does.

The pricing for the A10-7800 will be $155, on par with the A10-7700K. The main advantage of the A10-7800 over the A8-7600 is that it features higher clock speeds and two more GPU compute units. This gives it more power on the CPU and GPU side making it more capable of gaming and productivity.

Why not just buy an A10-7850K and set its TDP to 65W? You can do that but AMD claims that you’ll get more performance out of the A10-7800 at 65W than the A10-7850K at 65W. Not to mention that the A10-7850K is a more expensive option, especially if you have no desire to overclock. That’s why the A10-7800 SKU was created, to offer more performance than the A8-7600 but still in a small thermal envelope.

To entice consumers into buying its Kaveri APUs AMD will be offering a choice of a free game, consumers can choose one of three big titles. All three games are part of AMD’s Gaming Evolved program.

Is there anything new that the A10-7800 brings to the table? No not really. It is just a new SKU of the Kaveri APU architecture: a power optimised version of the A10-7850K. As a result of that we can expect its performance to be broadly similar to the A10-7850K, although a little slower and with a little less power draw.