AMD APU: How Much Progress Has Been Made?

Test System and Methods

Before we delve into any testing we would like to take this opportunity to overview our test system and thank those sponsors who kindly provided us with test equipment to make our work possible. We offer our thanks to:

Intel for supplying us with a Core i7 4770K processor, which we reviewed here and the Core i7 4790K processor, which we reviewed here.

AMD for supplying us with an FX-8350 processor, which we reviewed here, the A8-3870K, the A10-5800K, which we reviewed here, the A10-6800K, which we reviewed here and the A10-7850K, which we reviewed here.

ASUS for supplying us with an ASUS Crosshair IV Formula AM3+ motherboard, which we reviewed here, an ASUS F1A75-M PRO, which we reviewed here, an ASUS A88X-PRO, which we reviewed here, and an Maximus VII Ranger Z97 Motherboard, which we reviewed here.

Kingston for supplying us with a Hyper X 3K 240GB solid state drive, which we reviewed here, and the HyperX Fury 8GB 1866MHz memory kit, which we reviewed here.

Corsair for supplying us with a Hydro Series H100i liquid CPU cooler, which we reviewed here.

Be Quiet for supplying us with a Straight Power E9 680W power supply unit, which we reviewed here.

Sapphire for supplying us with an AMD R9 290 Tri-X graphics card, which we reviewed here.

Lian Li for supplying us with a PC-T60A test bench.

Noctua for supplying us with NT-H1 thermal compound.

Test System

• Motherboard: ASUS Crosshair IV Formula (AM3+), ASUS F1A75-M PRO (FM1), ASUS A88X-PRO (FM2+) and ASUS Maximus VII Ranger Z97 (LGA 1150)
• CPU: AMD FX-8350 processor, AMD A8-3870K APU, AMD A10-5800K APU, AMD A10-6800K APU, AMD A10-7850K APU, Intel Core i7 4770K processor and Intel Core i7 4790K processor
• GPU: Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X graphics card
• RAM: Kingston HyperX Fury 1866MHz 8GB kit (CL10, 2 x 4GB)
• Cooling: Corsair H100i with Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Compound
• Case: Lian Li PC-T60A test bench
• Storage Drives: Kingston 240GB Hyper X 3K SSD
• PSU: Be Quiet Straight Power E9 680W
• Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit SP1

Test Software

• 3DMark – available here.
• AIDA 64 Engineer – available here.
• Bioshock Infinite – available here.
• Cinebench – available here.
• Compubench – available here.
• CPUID HWMonitor – available here.
• CPU-Z – available here.
• Handbrake – available here.
• Luxmark – available here.
• Metro Last Light – available here.
• Prime95 – available here.
• SiSoft Sandra Engineer – available here.
• Tomb Raider – available here.
• WPrime – available here.