AMD A8-7650k Kaveri APU Review

Introduction 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; of which a previous comparison can be found here. These new range of APU's brought forward a new leap in internal graphic processing units (iGPU); making them more powerful and energy-efficient than ever before. Today we have the newest addition to the lineup, the A8-7650k. This chip is based on the A8-7600, but has been given the famous AMD 'Black Edition' treatment, allowing the user to overclock the core somewhat freely. Pricing in today's market is paramount, and producing a fully unlocked processor for the same price as its predecessor is mind-boggling. AMD seem to know how to pile the goodies into their products, offering a multitude of graphical advantages at such a low price throughout its entire range of APU's. Are we expecting anything different with this newest addition? I'd say not, with the same architecture as its little brother, the A8-7600, but just an unlocked multiplier and configurable TDP, we may seem some small gains once overclocked. Test System and Methods Before we delve into any testing we would like to take this opportunity to overview our test system. Test System Motherboard - Asus Crosshair Ranger A88x FM2+ RAM - 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3 1866Mhz Cruical Ballistix CPU Cooler - Thermaltake Water 3.0 with Gelid GC-Extreme Power Supply - BeQuiet Power Zone 1000W Main Storage Drive - Crucial M550 512GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Displays - U2868PQU 4K Operating System - Windows 8.1 Pro 64 Bit Games Used Bioshock Infinite Tomb Raider Test Software 3DMark - available here AIDA 64 Engineer - available here Cinebench - available here Compubench - available here CPUID HWMonitor - available here CPU-Z - available here Handbrake - available here Luxmark - available here Prime95 - available here SiSoft Sandra Engineer - available here WPrime - available here CPU Benchmarks - Cinebench, Handbrake and WPrime Cinebench R15 Cinebench is a widely respected benchmark for testing the performance of x86 CPUs. The program allows you to test single and multi-threaded performance as well as GPU performance by rendering with Open GL. Download here. Handbrake HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. Download here. WPrime wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions. wPrime is a free utility that is available for download here. Memory Benchmarks - AIDA64 and SiSoft Sandra AIDA64 Engineer AIDA64 Engineer is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for engineers. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Memory and cache benchmarks are available to analyze system RAM bandwidth and latency. Download here. SiSoft Sandra The SiSoft Sandra memory benchmark is based on STREAM. STREAM is a popular memory bandwidth benchmark that has been used on personal computers to super computers. It measures sustained memory bandwidth not burst or peak. Therefore, the results may be lower than those of other benchmarks. Download a free trial version of SiSoft Sandra here. Memory Latency As per usual, the AMD chips seems to have trouble communicating with the memory when compared to Intel's offerings. However we see the A8-7650k offering consistent performance against the rest of the Kaveri clan. OpenCL Benchmarks - Compubench and Luxmark Compubench CL CompuBench is a unified performance benchmarking tool that gives realistic feedback on the performance of various compute API implementations used for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. Based on CLBenchmark, the first professional OpenCL benchmark on the market, it compares CPUs, GPUs and accelerators of desktop and mobile devices by their compute performance characteristics. Download here. Due to upgrading to new test systems for 2015, we have issues sourcing a working Compubench 1.1.3 program due to a forced internet connection and update system. Due to this, we have updated to Compubench 1.5, which has different tests and results. We are now compiling a new results table for future reference. Luxmark LuxMark is a OpenCL benchmark tool. The idea for the program was conceived in 2009 by Jean-Francois 'Jromang' Romang. The idea was quite simple, wrap SLG inside an easy to use graphical user interface and use it as a benchmark for OpenCL. Download here. Discrete GPU and iGPU Benchmarks - 3DMark Fire Strike 3DMark 3DMark Firestrike is Futuremark's latest creation for testing the GPU performance of high-end gaming PCs using Direct X 11 graphics. You can download a free basic version of 3DMark here. iGPU Benchmarks - Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider Bioshock Infinite Bioshock Infinite is a first-person shooter developed by Irrational Games that is the third installment of the Bioshock series. The game is the last to be produced by Irrational Games before they announced their closure in February 2014. The game has sold over 4 million copies since its 2013 release. Comparing 1080p to 720p isn't fair, but you can see from the charts; that the iGPU installed in the Kaveri series is more than up for the task, just falling short of 60FPS. Overclocking and Overclocked Performance Overclocking is risky business, not only does it void your manufacturer warranty, but it has the potential to damage your components if done incorrectly. To overclock this particular APU, we placed it into our best A88x motherboard, which in previous reviews, has proven to be a good overclocking base. The procedure we will follow is simple, just adjust the multiplier until the system crashes, we notice artefacts on the screen or we hit over the 1.5v threshold. AMD CPU's can generally take a much higher voltage, but voltage tweaking is not for the inexperienced. As you can see, our A8-7650k topped out at 4.3 GHz for the CPU cores and 960 MHz for the GPU cores. Any higher frequencies, the system crashed during any opening process of applications and suffered heavy artefacts on-screen. Yet, that is still a 1 GHz/ MHz increase over stock. All of the below tests will have what overclock was applied to them during testing. The reason we split them down is the CPU made very little difference to the performance of the iGPU tests, used a lot more power and generated a lot more heat. Cinebench, Handbrake and WPrime Some modest performance gains to be seen here, heading the pack of AMD chips in all tests. AIDA64 and Sisoft Sandra Memory Tests Overclocking didn't really affect the memory speeds, possibly even made it worse. Compubench Tests Due to our new test systems, we could only compare against our range of AMD chips on the FM2+ platform. Here we see an overclock really brings out the best in the combined APU performance. Discrete and iGPU Tests Overclocking the GPU cores has released a lot of performance for the iGPU testing, putting it on par with the A10-7850k in most tests. The CPU overclocks yielded around 10% average performance increase. Power Consumption and Temperatures Power Consumption To measure power consumption, we use a killawatt meter and measure the total system power draw at the wall. We run three different scenarios for 5 minutes and take the average reading, these are Windows desktop idle, AIDA64's system stability test and Prime95's blend test. Temperatures To measure temperatures we run three different scenarios for 5 minutes: Windows desktop idle, AIDA64 Engineer system stability test and Prime95 Blend system load. We take the average maximum core temperature for AIDA64 and Prime95 and take the average minimum core temperature for desktop idle. 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.