AMD A8-5600k APU Processor Review

With the big success of FM1 and the Llano platform, we were keen to see what AMD had done in terms of updating it to appeal more to the current market who crave speed, performance and an all-in-one solution. Now we said in the beginning that you won’t normally find us looking at processors as we’d rather see what motherboard manufacturers have done to utilise the features and push the performance of their attached components but when it comes to a new launch product, we do feel that it needs to have its own view.

The first thing that I want to comment on is about the features. It seems AMD have listened to their existing users and developed the new FM2 based processors and chipsets for what the current user in this day and age require. They have developed three chipsets (albeit two that were existing) to showcase the whole stack of products ranging from the lower-end A4 all the way up to the more extreme A10 processors. Each processor and chipset are suited for each other and offer specific features based on the target market.

So lets look into the processor that we had in our hands; the A8-5600k which offers mid to high-end capabilities and is perfectly paired with the A85x chipset based board that we had at our disposal from Gigabyte today.

The performance itself was a bit hit and miss with this APU as it seemed that it took a bit of a back seat to Llano in the more CPU intensive based tests, but shone through when it came to graphics intensive tests, such as 3DMark 11. Another key area to note was based around power consumption which showed how little power these chips utilise, even when under extreme load through our benchmarking applications.

The overclockability of the A8-5600k wasn’t outstanding, but we aren’t dealing with an FX chip or Intel i7 which is a CPU. We have an APU which manages to squeeze the CPU and GPU aspects onto the same silicon which is a great feat in its own right. With this in mind, we do feel that the overclock we obtained was extremely successful and are quite proud of the jump the new APUs have taken from the original FM1 series.

Price wise you’ll be looking at just under the £80 mark for the APU itself and then obviously you have a large range of boards across three chipsets to go for, but we do recommend the A85x chipset and a good brand such as Gigabyte like we used today as it shows that they work really well together, it’s just a shame that the APU didn’t manage to offer a little bit more performance on the CPU side of things.