AMD Kaveri Review: A10-7850K, A10-7700K and A8-7600

Overclocking

Overclocking on Kaveri brings very impressive results providing you focus on the GPU part. In our overclocking analysis we pushed the GPU part to the most we could and then re-ran all our GPU intensive benchmarks to see what kind of gains we could achieve. Below is a summary of the results we achieved but for the entire overclocking analysis and results discussion please see the full article here.

“AMD’s Kaveri A10-7850K is a solid overclocker. While we settled at 1028MHz on the GPU we were able to go another divider higher with slight bumps in voltage and the enthusiastic overclocker might even be able to go a couple more dividers up into the 1100-1200MHz region. What a difference the 308 MHz extra made. Pairing up our overclock with fast RAM saw us making large gains in most GPU-centric applications. Most games scaled well and we saw around 10% extra performance compared to stock GPU clocks. Best of all this overclocking only added about 20W to the total system power consumption meaning the A10-7850K with 2400MHz RAM and a hefty GPU overclock consumed less power than the stock last-generation A10-6800K with 1866MHz RAM – very impressive stuff indeed.” More here.

PCMark7 didn’t show very substantial gains as it is quite CPU-centric despite having a graphics segment to the test.

PCMark8 showed some very healthy gains thanks to having both a gaming segment to the test and offering OpenCL acceleration.

Basemark CL showed the largest gains of all the benchmarks because compute scales well with frequency increases. Anyone using the A10-7850K for compute applications will benefit hugely from overclocking, though you’ll need to ensure the overclock is rock-solid stable if you’re using it for work-based applications.

Compubench is another compute based application that shows excellent scaling due to AMD’s strong performance in OpenCL.

Luxmark showed very good scaling though when you add the CPU into the mix the scaling seems to be less impressive.

Photoshop CC performance was already ridiculously fast so I didn’t expect to see much of a change with the overclock, we saw about a 1 second improvement but as its within margin of error it really is too close to call.

Musemage loves AMD GPUs and so I’m not surprised to see a drastic jump in performance from the 42% frequency overclock. If you use Musemage for photo editing you can see the huge productivity potential here from overclocking.

In LibreOffice we saw around a 20% reduction in calculation times using OpenCL GPU acceleration so the benefits are substantial. Again I cannot stress enough how important I think this will be for AMD’s next generation FirePro APUs.

3DMark11 showed a significant jump of almost 30% – very impressive numbers indeed.

Into 3DMark and we saw a similarly high boost of about 25% which bodes well for gaming.

Game scaling perhaps wasn’t as impressive as 3DMark led me to believe it would be. Scaling was typically 10% or less and it’s easy to see that most games scale more from making the jump from 1866MHz RAM to 2400MHz RAM than they do from having a 720MHz to 1028MHz overclock – which to me does seem a bit strange but is easily explained. It would imply that the APU is still memory bandwidth limited at 2400MHz so overclocking makes little difference, this also explains why compute applications scale so well because they are not that bandwidth dependent and can take advantage of the increased GPU clock speed.

Power consumption was a strong point of the Kaveri A10-7850K. Even by lumping a 42% overclock onto the GPU the power consumption with a realistic combined system load only jumped 21 Watts. On a purely GPU load it jumped 31 Watts, which is a 40% jump so nearly aligns perfectly with the 42% frequency increase. However, with the overclock the A10-7850K was still more power efficient on a combined workload than the last generation A10-6800K APU (at stock clocks on both the CPU and GPU with slower DDR3-1866MHz memory).