AMD A10 6790 review - Introduction

AMD's A10 6790 APU tested & benchmarked

We review the AMD A10 6790 APU processor, the little brother of the A10-6800K and the slightly bigger brother of the A10-6700 just became available in the stores. With performance levels close to the 6800 this might be the budget APU to pick up and build yourself a nice Windows 8 PC. Based on Piledriver architecture this processor slash graphics hybrid symbiosis called APU remains hard to beat in terms of features performance and well all the goodness you can expect from a great APU. Value and fun is what the platform offers as you can pick-up this new APU for roughly 120 EUR, and that is a great price for what you are purchasing alright.

APUs - most of you guys know by now that that means but for those of you that don't, here we go. APUs are able to combine the potential of the processor and GPU together to enable a new class of compute performance in today’s PCs. You know, back in May 2012 AMD introduced a series of AMD A10 'Trinity' APUs as mobile and notebook solutions. Trinity APUs where the successor of the AMD A4, A6 and A8 Llano-processors. Today AMD marches onwards with Richland, basically in short wording this is a re-spin of Trinity. But before we start off this review, let me state this like we always do with APU reviews; see we are a bit of an enthusiast based website so I want to make it very clear here, the A10 and A8 APU processors are entry level to mid-range targeted processors, please do understand that very clearly. That means you are looking at reasonable desktop CPU experience versus (in AMD's case) an enhanced integrated GPU, and all that for very interesting prices. But they are not intended as enthusiast class PC gaming rigs okay?

Today we test the A10 6790 APU, based on Richland architecture. The A10-6790K quad core CPU features 4.1GHz base clock speed and a 4.3GHz turbo core speed. The 384 AMD Radeon 8670D graphics cores at clocked at 844MHz. The APU memory controller supports up to DDR3-1866MHz memory speeds. As a K-series processor it is unlocked, and has an SEP of $130USD / 120 EUR. This new APU replaces the A10-5800K to increase performance at a highly popular price point. AMD released Richland to make their APUs a little more performance oriented for the PC crowd. The A10-6790 APU tested in this review is rated at 65W running at 4.1 GHz with a Turbo allowance towards 4300 MHz. For an APU these are high frequencies.  The A10 APU comes with a 4MB L2 cache and packs 384 Radeon (8670D) cores with that embedded GPU running at 844 MHz, and that is slightly clocked faster than the A10 5800K (the last generation flagship APU). Equipped with 384 Radeon (shader) cores, you might think that by itself this is not a massive GPU, however in the IGP arena that's serious performance as even Intel's new Haswell IGP cannot compete with the performance that AMD can offer with the A10 APUs. The APU is based on Piledriver cores, Piledriver simply put means the new revision of AMD's Bulldozers cores, these are very similar to AMD's FX series processors.

Next page please, where we'll go a little more in-depth.