AMD A10-7800 “Kaveri” APU Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

AMD’s A10-7800 APU has an MSRP of $155 and comes with a 3 year warranty. The UK price should be around £110-115 while the EU price should be around €140-145.

Overview

The AMD A10-7800 APU is a worthy product SKU for AMD to release, it serves a purpose in offering strong level of performance in a low power and compact form factor. As a new release I find it hard to get that excited about the A10-7800 APU since it is merely a throttled version of the A10-7850K. The throttling mainly occurs on the CPU side, as our results show the CPU performance takes a significant hit moving down from 65 to 45W, yet power consumption only drops by around 10-15W. Given that the A10-7850K APU was already in a precarious place in terms of CPU performance, the A10-7800 feels CPU constrained. In terms of the GPU aspect, we see virtually identical performance to the A10-7850K when comparing the 65W mode – in the 45W mode the GPU performance takes a slight tumble but this is mainly due to the fact the CPU is bottlenecking the graphics performance. The overall performance of this APU in 45W mode is sufficient for most people’s needs and is capable of a reasonable gaming experience and some productivity.

The important question is: what kind of functional purpose does the A10-7800 serve compared to the A8-7600 (which offers equivalent TDP functions) or A10-7850K (which offers the same hardware and also the ability to run at a 45W TDP)? The expectation is that buyers of this part will want the 45W mode as this is where the A10-7800 does well, that low TDP enables you to build systems in smaller form factors because you don’t have to dissipate as much heat and you do not need a discrete GPU. However, the A8-7600 also offers that same 45W mode for $54 less. We could certainly see some interesting compact and maybe even fanless systems built using the A10-7800, it should make very powerful HTPCs, but in a HTPC environment I am still more inclined to recommend the A8-7600. Relatively speaking the A10-7800 should offer about 10-20% more GPU performance than the A8-7600 when comparing at the 45W envelopes, most of that is driven by the extra GPU compute units that are made available, but how useful are these extra GPU cores really going to be for the typical use-case scenarios of a 45W TDP APU? With that said the 45W mode should still be the main use of the A10-7800, as a 65W part there’s no difference between this and the A10-7850K in power consumption – it merely costs a bit less and takes a CPU performance hit.

Would I recommend that you rush to a retailer and buy one of these? Possibly, but I think you need to have a use for a 45W APU with more graphics horsepower than the A8-7600 and to me that market seems modest in the desktop space. Power efficient APUs with stronger iGPUs might be something AMD would benefit more from by targeting the notebook space as well as new mobile form factors similar to things like Intel’s NUC. I believe that if power consumption is the primary concern for you then you’d be better off with the cheaper A8-7600. I can visualise the idea of the AMD A10-7800 if you just need a processor with a fair amount of graphics horsepower but don’t quite need the extra speed or overclockability that the A10-7850K possesses – not to mention you’ll save yourself $20 as well. However, at the same time there aren’t that many applications that are able to take advantage of GPU compute yet, and the A10-7800 isn’t really cut out for much in the way of gaming. I guess what I am trying to say in simple terms is that the A10-7800 is an interesting chip, but it doesn’t offer enough more than the A8-7600 to justify a price that is 50% higher.

Pros

• Maintains strong GPU performance in 65 and 45W modes
• Retains all the features of the A10-7850K flagship
• Pricing is competitive relative to the A10-7850K
• Part of game bundle program

Cons

• CPU performance takes a hit to lower TDP
• Power consumption isn’t as good as it should be given the TDP claims
• Doesn’t offer anything that is strictly new
• Pricing is dubious relative to the A8-7600
• Applications that can use GPU compute are still sparse

“The A10-7800 demonstrates the low-power promise of AMD’s Kaveri architecture: there is a solid amount of overall performance to be had in such a power frugal unit.”

Thank you to AMD for providing this review sample.