AMD A8-5600k APU Processor Review

You won't normally find us taking a look at processors, even though we use them daily in our tests when looking at the huge array of motherboards from brands such as Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte and MSI, but sometimes a processor in its own right gets a bit overlooked shall we say. We tend to reserve an article devoted to a CPU or APU for when something new is released, which is where we find ourselves today. AMD have released their second generation of APU products, under the FM2 platform. We all know of the FM1 based processors, codenamed Llano, which were a huge hit for the budget-end of the market, by offering something that rivals such key processor ranges as the Intel i3 processors by offering better onboard graphics among other key aspects, including a better price point. With FM2 now fully released, a new stack of processors utilising the Bulldozer Piledriver architecture, with the codename Trinty, under the Virgo platform. Lots of fancy names, but don't worry, we don't expect you to remember them all. For now, we only want you to remember one key model; the A8-5600k, as that's what we'll be looking at in detail today. AMD have released this APU offering higher clock speeds than the Llano based predecessor with newer technologies and features, but how does it fair when it comes to grunt and performance? There's only one way to find out, by running it through our extensive benchmark suite, but before we do that, we want to show a little bit of a background on the product and what it has to offer for the type of user, and market that its aimed at. AMD told us at a recent press conference about their release of the range and how they will have the "whole stack" available at launch and as you can see from the below image, quite a few APUs are being released and the one we have available today is sitting just at the higher-end of the scale with a TDP of 100W, 256 Radeon cores with a GPU clock speed of 760MHz. CPU wise, we have four cores to play with with a base frequency of 3.6GHz and turbo speed of 3.9GHz. It will also quite happily run our Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz kit straight out of the box with memory support up to this speed and for the budding overclockers out there, you'll be happy to see that being a "k" derivite, it comes unlocked. AMD being typical AMD, they want to make it easy for their users to upgrade, much like we saw with AM2+ and AM3+. Sadly, for users of the Llano FM1 socket processors, you will need to upgrade your board to the newer FM2 socket, but now AMD are adamant that FM2 will last around 3 years and will support the future, next generation processors. Under the FM2 socket, you will also notice three key chipsets; A55, A75 and A85X depending on your uses and of course budget. As this isn't your typical CPU you would expect to find some other nifty little features. Of course, this is an APU and the desktop processor and graphics teams at AMD have teamed up to chuck in some much sought after features, including Eyefinity. Eyefinity is a feature that all of the latest AMD Radeon graphics cards include, and now we see it being developed into the new Trinity APUs and can be enabled within Catalyst Control Centre. Utilising on the above Eyefinity technology, we'll also see multi monitor support for Windows 8, meaning you will be able to span your applications across 3 screens, as if it were one single monitor. Before, we saw applications being restricted to three monitors by locking a maximum size to each individual screen, whereas Windows 8 will harness this better technology to make things better for the user. Taking a more detailed look at the APU itself, we can see that when comparing to an older A8-3870k (on the right) that the design hasn't changed with a large IHS covering the bulk of the APU. The FM2 based A8-5600k features a 3.6GHz clock speed with Turbo CORE 3.0 boosting it to 3.9GHz and features 256 Radeon cores with a clock speed of 760MHz. FM1 and FM2 may look similar but are not backwards/forwards compatible with each other and we can confirm this when looking at the pins. On the left we can see the layout of the pins on an FM1 based A8-3870k compared to the newer FM2 based A8-5600k on the right. Straight away you can see the pins have moved in a variety of locations but at a first look you may not notice it. We also want to talk through a bit about the chipsets on offer too as there are a total of three arising from the FM2 socket platform. Due to the APU models that we spoke about on the previous page, will all depend on the type of user that you are and of course, the type of market that the APU is aimed at. With this in mind, AMD have tried to tailor the chipset and therefore motherboards to the user also. The three chipsets supporting FM2 are A55, A75 and A85X. The first thing that you'll notice is that the A55 and A75 chipsets have been updated from the Llano FM1 platform, by adding support for the new FM2 socket APU processors. With this, the feature set has remained the same on these two chipsets, but we will briefly talk through the features of each, with special focus on the new A85X chipset as we are enthusiasts at heart, right? A55 The first chipset on offer is the A55 chipset which we originally saw with the launch of the FM1 Llano based APU processors. Feature wise we find recommended support for the A4 and A6 APU family, though the A8 and A10 range can also be used but would be classed as overkill. The chipset gives SATA II 3Gb/s support as well as the ability to have a single discrete graphics card. A75 The second chipset you can use is the A75 chipset, which once again, originally graced us with FM1 and has seen the beneficial move to the FM2 range of processors. This chipset sees the recommendation moving to the A6 and A8 range though once again, A4 and A10 products can be used if you wish. The chipset offers up SATA III 6Gb/s ports and native USB 3.0 support. With native SATA III and USB 3.0, this chipset is open to quite a broad spectrum of users ranging from the budget conscious to those interested in a bit of light gaming. A85X Lastly we find the new addition of the A85X chipset which we find the recommended family of processors is the A8 and A10 series. The A85X is a completely new chipset, made especially for this new range of products and is aimed at the higher-end enthusiast market and gamers who can't necessarily afford to spend more money by obtaining an AM3+ based system. The chipset offers eight SATA III 6Gb/s ports, native USB 3.0 support and also gives users the functionality of CrossFireX support. To test this board, we are able to run all of our tests at stock speeds using a pre-defined setup of hardware. We will also be overclocking the processor to 4.6GHz to see how the board compares against the stock speed. Also in terms of overclocking, we will be looking to see how far we can push the processor. Test system: Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 AMD A8-5600k Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 16GB Corsair H80 Corsair HX1050 Kingston V+100 128GB SSD Lian Li T60 We would like to thank Asus, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible. Software used: 3DMark 11 AIDA64 Cinebench R11.5 CPU-Z PCMark 7 SuperPI This being a new technology, new type of processor and new platform in general, we never quite know what to expect but coupled up with a high-end board from Gigabyte, we were hopefuly that we could push things as far as possible. The Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 utilises the higher-end and new A85x chipset and allowed us to easily start tweaking the speed of the APU through use of the unlocked multiplier on our A8-5600k. The first point was to disable Turbo CORE and other technologies that involve adjusting the speed of the chip without our input. Once this was done, we went straight in at 1.475V as the maximum rated voltage from AMD though you can go higher at your own risk. We pushed our multiplier to 42x and managed to boot and start benchmarking with 100% stability across a variety of benchmark applications. Not content on stopping there, we pushed to 4.3GHz using the 43x multiplier with the same stability and our next logical step was 4.4GHz using the 44x multiplier. The NB voltage needed to be increased slightly to 1.3V to provide extra stability once in Windows and things were stable throughout all of our tests. Sadly the next step up at 4.5GHz managed to boot into Windows but proved that stability was a bit flaky and more volts would be needed so we decided to stop at 4.4GHz at 1.475. Behind the scenes we did manage to push this chip to 4.7GHz on the Gigabyte board but this required a much higher voltage of 1.6V which we can't condone as being safe for 24/7 usage, even though our temperatures seemed to be fine through idle and load under the Corsair H80 closed loop system, even when running some of the most extreme and extensive stress test applications on the market today including render and calculation tests which we use for peace of mind when it comes to stability for our reviews. Cinebench R11.5 CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It's completely free. When comparing two FM1 processors to the new FM2 5600k in Cinebench, we can see that AMD possibly got something wrong when it comes to calculations and rendering as the newer 5600k came at the bottom of our tests with the older technology performing better. The overclock to 4.4GHz did help but still only managed to push ahead of a stock running 3870k Llano APU. Super PI Super PI is a computer program that calculates pi to a specified number of digits after the decimal point—up to a maximum of 32 million. It uses Gauss–Legendre algorithm and is a Windows port of the program used by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 to compute pi to 232 digits. It was exactly the same story with Super PI and saw similar results with the A8-5600k giving us the slowest calculation time with the A8-3870k beating it by around 4 minutes quicker. Even with the overclock to 4.4GHz, the 5600k wasn't able to push past a stock performing 3870k. 3DMark 11 3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online. The newer technology was able to redeem itself within 3DMark 11 due to the assistance of the better onchip graphics technology within the 5600k. The overclock helped push scores further slightly, but overclocking both the CPU and GPU aspect of the APU would see these numbers jump even higher. PCMark 7 PCMark 7 provides a set of 7 suites for measuring different aspects of PC performance with a high degree of accuracy. Overall system performance is measured by the PCMark Suite. The Lightweight Suite measures the capabilities of entry level systems and mobility platforms unable to run the full PCMark suite. Common use performance is measured by the Entertainment, Creativity and Productivity scenario suites. Component performance is measured by the Computation and Storage hardware suites. The Storage suite is ideal for testing SSDs and external hard drives in addition to the system drive. PCMark7 is probably the best test for a product like this, as it gives an all-round result showcasing CPU and GPU based performance, which is essentially what we find within an APU. The 5600k managed to storm ahead of the older Llano based APUs and the overclock to 4.4GHz saw this move forward by quite a large margin again. Power Consumption To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the system takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment. Power is something we were keen to test as these APU based products are expected to run at low usage levels and we see that coming true across the board. While the FM1 based APUs use less power, they also have slower, older technology and therefore was expected. Even with the overclock to 4.4GHz, we didn't see the load power usage peak above 114 Watts which is simply fantastic when aiming this type of product at the market segment that AMD have in mind. 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.