In the Mantle part of the article you wrote 'On the next page we'll also have a peek at Ultra quality settings with 4xAA. But yeah these are massive perf gains.' however the next page was the conclusion. Would it also be possible to see some dual graphics results by pairing the APU with a DDR3 R7 graphics card. It also be nice to see if dual graphics works with a GDDR5 R7 if possible as there seems to be some confusion about if this works or not.

7850k seems good This is an excellent review, that shows the AMD 7850K APU performance pretty well. One thing can be improved is the usage of a GTX770 instead of the much older GTX580 for the discrete GPU performance, and just mention the 1080p performance that would be a more balanced one. Still the AMD 7850k APU can be clubbed with an upper mid range GPU like GTX770 or R9280X resulting in good performance than I initially thought.

You paint an extremely impressive picture of the Kaveri APU, Hilbert! Many thanks.

No overclocking?

The whole power consuption page shows A8 7600 instead of A10...

The whole power consuption page shows A8 7600 instead of A10...

Ah its showing the wrong ones, updated & thanks.

Ah its showing the wrong ones, updated & thanks.

No problem. Great work man 🙂 Also in the introduction it is written: " today we look at the mainstream Kaveri APU, the AMD A8-7600"

Cool, you tried OCing it boss?

And I'll be forced to go with an i5 since AMD can't cough out (and apparently is uninterested in that) a CPU at least as fast as the FX-8350 when it came out. Kaveri with HSA and all that is a nice technology, but not exactly ideal for gaming PC... as the article concludes after all.

And I'll be forced to go with an i5 since AMD can't cough out (and apparently is uninterested in that) a CPU at least as fast as the FX-8350 when it came out. Kaveri with HSA and all that is a nice technology, but not exactly ideal for gaming PC... as the article concludes after all.

I don't know anyone in their right mind who would go for an APU for a serious gaming rig. Ignoring the CPU issues entirely, you'd be wasting most of your money on an IGP that will go unused if you use a discrete card (at least a discrete card you don't intend to crossfire with). What many people don't seem to get is AMD needs an edge over intel, and that APUs are not specifically for gamers. GPGPU is the future of computing, and that's exactly what these APUs are good at. They're specifically not meant to be good at your generic CPU tasks; you're supposed to buy an APU for things like openCL and other GPU accelerated tasks. Intel has the crown for best CPU processing power and there's nothing AMD can do to compete with that at this point. So, people need to stop expecting it and change their views on what they need a CPU for if they want to support AMD. People complain that there's no competition with Intel but that's because aside from pricing, there's no reason to. Every CPU brand has it's purpose. Intel is good for high-end workstations and serious gaming systems. AMD is good for GPGPU solutions. ARM is good for tiny and low-power solutions. PPC platforms are designed for reliability/redundancy. SPARC is good for parallelization. There is no 1-size-fits-all and the only company that's trying to do that is Intel. The problem is intel is too caught up in their idea that raw CPU performance is above all else, and that's crippling their efforts to defeat the other markets. So in a way, there really is competition. Anyway on a side note, what AMD needs to do above all else right now is get triple or quad channel memory in their APUs. Their memory controller is actually amazingly good, but it could dominate intel's if they added another channel, and it would probably turn the "hmm not bad" gaming results into "holy crap that's good".

And I'll be forced to go with an i5 since AMD can't cough out (and apparently is uninterested in that) a CPU at least as fast as the FX-8350 when it came out. Kaveri with HSA and all that is a nice technology, but not exactly ideal for gaming PC... as the article concludes after all.

The Athlon X4K versions of these with the GPU disabled should be a good deal faster CPU wise, and be far cheaper than an i5

I don't know anyone in their right mind who would go for an APU for a serious gaming rig. Ignoring the CPU issues entirely, you'd be wasting most of your money on an IGP that will go unused if you use a discrete card (at least a discrete card you don't intend to crossfire with). What many people don't seem to get is AMD needs an edge over intel, and that APUs are not specifically for gamers. GPGPU is the future of computing, and that's exactly what these APUs are good at. They're specifically not meant to be good at your generic CPU tasks; you're supposed to buy an APU for things like openCL and other GPU accelerated tasks. Intel has the crown for best CPU processing power and there's nothing AMD can do to compete with that at this point. So, people need to stop expecting it and change their views on what they need a CPU for if they want to support AMD. People complain that there's no competition with Intel but that's because aside from pricing, there's no reason to. Every CPU brand has it's purpose. Intel is good for high-end workstations and serious gaming systems. AMD is good for GPGPU solutions. ARM is good for tiny and low-power solutions. PPC platforms are designed for reliability/redundancy. SPARC is good for parallelization. There is no 1-size-fits-all and the only company that's trying to do that is Intel. The problem is intel is too caught up in their idea that raw CPU performance is above all else, and that's crippling their efforts to defeat the other markets. So in a way, there really is competition. Anyway on a side note, what AMD needs to do above all else right now is get triple or quad channel memory in their APUs. Their memory controller is actually amazingly good, but it could dominate intel's if they added another channel, and it would probably turn the "hmm not bad" gaming results into "holy crap that's good".

Quad channel DDR4 😀

EEE disappointed with no OVERCLOCKING at all

And my Phenom II X6 1100T keeps going strong.

I find this very impressive for AMD offering for once

I don't know anyone in their right mind who would go for an APU for a serious gaming rig. Ignoring the CPU issues entirely, you'd be wasting most of your money on an IGP that will go unused if you use a discrete card (at least a discrete card you don't intend to crossfire with).

Note that I wrote "CPU", not "APU" 🙂 . I'm not interested in having an APU anywhere else but a laptop. And I would very much like to see AMD at least try to compete with Intel in the high-end segment to avoid the bad things that happen when there is no competition.

The Athlon X4K versions of these with the GPU disabled should be a good deal faster CPU wise, and be far cheaper than an i5

I didn't hear anything about that. Some sort of new Athlon on the outdated AM3+? Or even FM2+? I doubt it will be at least as "good" as the best Phenoms or FXes though. 🙁

I don't know anyone in their right mind who would go for an APU for a serious gaming rig. Ignoring the CPU issues entirely, you'd be wasting most of your money on an IGP that will go unused if you use a discrete card (at least a discrete card you don't intend to crossfire with). What many people don't seem to get is AMD needs an edge over intel, and that APUs are not specifically for gamers. GPGPU is the future of computing, and that's exactly what these APUs are good at. They're specifically not meant to be good at your generic CPU tasks; you're supposed to buy an APU for things like openCL and other GPU accelerated tasks. Intel has the crown for best CPU processing power and there's nothing AMD can do to compete with that at this point. So, people need to stop expecting it and change their views on what they need a CPU for if they want to support AMD. People complain that there's no competition with Intel but that's because aside from pricing, there's no reason to. Every CPU brand has it's purpose. Intel is good for high-end workstations and serious gaming systems. AMD is good for GPGPU solutions. ARM is good for tiny and low-power solutions. PPC platforms are designed for reliability/redundancy. SPARC is good for parallelization. There is no 1-size-fits-all and the only company that's trying to do that is Intel. The problem is intel is too caught up in their idea that raw CPU performance is above all else, and that's crippling their efforts to defeat the other markets. So in a way, there really is competition. Anyway on a side note, what AMD needs to do above all else right now is get triple or quad channel memory in their APUs. Their memory controller is actually amazingly good, but it could dominate intel's if they added another channel, and it would probably turn the "hmm not bad" gaming results into "holy crap that's good".

i agree, they're actually making a very smart move by staying in the competition this way. but i seriously feel like they've got the wrong segment. why isn't this pushed forward more aggressively towards laptops? why is this so prominent on desktops when laptops would benefit from this a lot more? how many amd laptops are there, compared to intel/nvidia laptops? too damn few. i feel like if amd can't do something solid to improve performance they will fall behind to much. you cannot avoid direct competition forever through low pices and some features that are barely used. let's be realistic, there is monopoly in the high-performance cpus segment and it's currently held by intel. amd barely competes with a bloody 2600k from 2 generations ago. this is a joke -.-. and for people like me who actually need cpu power it's very bad. i paid 400$ for this cpu, and right after i bought it, the prices went up another 100 bucks because no competition. i don't even want to open the topic of fx 9590 which was priced around 1000$ on a ridiculous tdp. pure money grab. amd fanboys actually expected it to overclock higher, while intel fanboys bashed the hell out of that cpu. and intel 6-cores have a ridiculous price. amd needs to wake up and focus on performance. where are the days when amd was downright top of the line along with intel, competing the hell out of each other in performance and price?

letdown wow, im not impressed by those numbers at all. looks like ill be staying with my 5800k much longer then I wanted to. 6 frames(1080p) isn't worth 70+$ from the apu perspective alone. not to mention a board upgrade. Oh! an one other thing, how come no one ever does a review on the dual graphics aspect of this whole setup? personally I am one of those dual graphics users. im curious to see some numbers on that.

Once again, Core i7 + Nvidia GTX 8xx FTW. Sorry AMD but you just can't cut it. EDIT: Yes I know the 8xx series isn't out yet, but it will be by the time I buy my next PC. 🙂

Once again, Core i7 + Nvidia GTX 8xx FTW. Sorry AMD but you just can't cut it.

*facepalm*

Once again, Core i7 + Nvidia GTX 8xx FTW. Sorry AMD but you just can't cut it. EDIT: Yes I know the 8xx series isn't out yet, but it will be by the time I buy my next PC. 🙂

You appear to have completely missed the point for APU's, hence the facepalm comment you've already had.