AMD A8-7650k Kaveri APU Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

AMD’s A8-7650k APU has an MSRP of $97 and comes with a 3-year warranty. This particular APU is currently unavailable from our recommended UK e-tailers, but we estimate UK prices will be around £79.

Overview

AMD has released yet another cracking APU, AMD doing what AMD do best. Kaveri is a very strong APU line up, the A8-7650k has just made it even stronger, bringing open overclocking to a sub £100 consumer market. AMD has always had the upper hand when cramming GPU performance into a CPU, but AMD then falls on sheer CPU performance. This little quad-core performs very well and its performance fits in well with the rest of the Kaveri range. The advancement in nano process shows in this chip; coming out top in some of the compute tasks.

I personally liked how easy this APU is to work with, very simple to set up and use and gets you gaming at low resolutions very quickly. A simple download system from AMD for its drivers and a quick installation are also welcome benefits. Its power consumption is one of the lowest I’ve seen from an AMD APU and very low considering the performance. It was also one of our coolest chips when hooked up to our Thermaltake Water 3.0 AIO unit. Its overclocked performance is admirable, showing some very modest gains from such a relatively small overclock; even knocking the flagship A10-7850k off the top APU spot in both CPU and iGPU tests. Pricing for this is very good indeed, AMD has seemed to push the standard A8-7600 APU aside and introduce this new chip into the line up for the same price; That’s like Intel introducing the i7-4770k for the same price as the i7-4770.

With the good, comes the bad. This little chip didn’t like a decent overclock, the CPU core topped out at 4.3 GHz, which in AMD terms is fairly low and the iGPU core topped at 960 MHz. Now this could be down to any number of factors; poor silicone quality or maybe recycling binned A10-7700k’s being the most likely. Other than a poor overclock, the testing performance, cost and everything else has pleased me.

Now, here I would normally recommend something that AMD could do better for the APU, something that they could do better or different. I honestly can’t say anything. The product placement is well thought out for the level of performance given in both AMD’s product line-up and in the price line-up.

Pros

• Strong performance for a mid-range APU
• Retains all the features of the Kaveri range
• Pricing is competitive; relative to the A10-7850K

Cons

• Poorer overclocking capabilities for a K chip
• Doesn’t bring anything “new” to the table considering how late it has been released
• Applications that can use GPU compute are still relatively sparse

“The A8-7650k pumps out great mid range performance for very little money. Great option for a HTPC with its low power consumption and decent iGPU”

Thank you to AMD for providing this review sample.