Finals Words and conclusion
Final words and conclusion
By releasing the A10-6790 APU AMD fills a tiny gap inbetween the A10-6700 and A10 6800K processor. The APU replaces the A10-5800K at a popular price point. Much like our AMD A10 6700 and 6800K review we have similar things to say about the AMD A10 6790, as it is really all roughly the same performance. Richland is interesting, however coming from Trinity it really remains roughly the same APU yet tweaked on the clocks, turbos and memory controller. That's it. However it's the first series APUs that delivers 'up-to' mainstream processor performance and that I find to be interesting. AMD locked in the A10-6790K at a nice 4300 MHz turbo clock frequency for an A10 APU, and that remains impressive to see. We feel that the A10 6970 as tested today is a product for entry-level towards mainstream PCs and just an excellent solution for HTPCs. Both CPU and GPU wise you'll see roughly similar performance compared to the A10 5800 and A10 6800K though. The base-clock of 4100 MHz is nice alright.
Performance
Overall though our conclusion remains similar to other A10 reviews we have written, the big caveat for Trinity and Richland series will remain its raw processor power. If only these puppies could have processor performance like Intel offers then they would dominate and rule everywhere, that's just not the case. Credit where credit is due and the IGP inside the APU is leading and highly programmable. OpenCL and anything compute related is more getting more hip & trendy these days and that makes an AMD APU a huge plus. Realistically if you build a PC for everyday usage like browsing, a little work like perhaps Photoshop then it's all good really. But sure, purely looking at the APU from a processor point of view, it all remains a little on the entry level side of things.
The APU GPU performance however is very good, rock solid even. With the IGP you can even play game at 720P and some even at 1080P considering you flick down image quality settings, and that's progress alright. Combined with a great video de and encode and all the multi-monitor output lovin this APU offers, AMD simply wins hands down opposed to anything Intel has to offer. Intel is is gaining IGP performance fast though, if anything the latest generation Haswell processors have shown that. OpenCL / GPGPU performance as shows hauls the proverbial toosh as AMD is very strong here.
Power Consumption
We already mentioned the topic, but TDP wise AMD has set this A10 6790 APU at 65 Watt, and that in this day and age is reasonable for what the product really is and offers. In IDLE (no dedicated graphics card installed) you'd sit at roughly 40 to 45 Watts, however when we start to stress the CPU cores then power consumption boosts upwards to roughly 120 / 130 Watt (for the entire PC).
The platform overall
Any APU based platform will offer massive value for money. A very strong selling point for AMD is obviously is the embedded GPU. And combined with the A85X chipset, features like a native six fold of SATA-600 and USB 3.0 support is being offered. Also a very powerful Catalyst based software suite surrounding AMDs APUs definitely brings heaps of advantages to them opposed to the competition. So if you purchase an A75 or A85X motherboard, PSU, HDD/SSD, memory and the APU -- and you are good to go really -- a fully functional PC is what you get, for relatively little money. The A10 6790K APU offers decent enough CPU performance, excellent multi-media options, the Full HD experience and sure, even gaming albeit very low level will work.
Concluding
The A10 6790 SKU is really the mini-me version of it's bigger brother the 6800K. It is not that different from that APU when it comes to graphics and logical CPU performance. AMD's A10-6790 APU as tested today again offers what AMD always offers, an interesting alternative with every gadget available on-board. If you purchase an A10 APU with the combination of that 85X based motherboard, you'll have a processor, graphics subsystem, up-to eight SATA-600 ports, USB 3.0, heaps of USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, HD audio and you simply get a very up-to-date PC. So for 120 EUR the A10 6790 can make a lot of sense. The APU remains hard to beat in terms of features performance and well all the goodness you can expect from a great processing unit. And let me just state that this is an excellent APU for a HTPC or a simple Windows 8.1 PC.
Our conclusion stands, an AMD A10-6790 APU with an A85X based motherboard for regular daily usage is just fine, it's great for HTPCs, a home server and even a game or two albeit in lower resolutions. Gamers with more high-end dedicated graphics cards will however require a little more boom-boom-pow in the raw processor performance. And yeah, if in the future more applications will make use of OpenCL, then the sun will rise for AMD alright as man, OpenCL performance for AMD is just glorious.
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