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.
