AMD A10 7870K CPU Review – Welcoming Competition!

The A10-7870K is not any version of Carrizo. It relies on the same Steamroller cores as Kaveri, hence the title ‘Kaveri Refresh’, and is the same architecture as Kaveri.

This is the “big daddy” of Kaveri, nicknamed Godvari by enthusiasts, since this is the highest clocked and best binned APU available on the market today.

The A10 7870K is very similar to the A10 7850K, except clocked at 3.9 GHz and 3.7GHz on the CPU and 866MHz and 720MHz respectively. The A10 7870K is priced at $140 and the A10 7850K is priced at $125

MARKET AND COMPETITION

Many of us enthusiasts may not care much about how well the integrated performance on this chip is, but AMD has a solid argument here pointing out that many people still use integrated graphics in home and business uses. We can see some markets for this chip in HTPCs with a focus on light gaming, since the APU only costs $140. Getting a motherboard APU and RAM for around $250 makes building a system ready for light gaming, most desktop work and media playback with AMD Fluid motion a technology that does frame interpolation and solid 4k video playback.

While these APUs won’t be replacing professional rendering machines anytime soon, they can hold up in blender or other 3D modeling programs if you don’t try to push them too hard.

With the addition of Freesync we can see many people enjoying their desktop experience with an APU and a Nexeus Vue 1080P 144Hz monitor or the AOC G2460PQU for $250 although most gamers who want the most performance per dollar may want to look into spending their hard earned dollars on other parts of their build.

OVERCLOCKING

Overclocking on Kaveri with the iGPU (integrated-GPU) is a bit tricky, since there is a power limiter that clocks the CPU down when the iGPU is under full load. The clock speed that our chip was dropped to was 2.8 GHz after tweaking which we will get into in our Kaveri overclocking guide. We got the CPU to clock up to 3.5GHz while using the iGPU.

We were also able to get the CPU to clock to 4.3Ghz stable at 1.375V, anything over that caused too much thermal throttling in prolonged workloads for our Hyper 212 to handle, for a more through overclock on better cooling and a guide be sure to check back to our site soon!

AMD FREESYNC 

With the CPU sample AMD was also kind enough to provide us with a Freesync enabled monitor.

For those of you who are unaware of what and how Freesync works, Freesync is a branding of monitors that support dynamic refresh rate aimed at reducing screen tearing. It’s advantages over Nvidia’s G-Sync is it is royalty-free, free of use and causes no performance penalty. The maximum theoretical range is 9Hz-240Hz, our monitor had a range of 30Hz-90Hz. On something like an APU its advantages are clear. In a gaming environment we all know what V-Sync does causing input delay. Freesync remedies this by changing the refresh rate of the monitor in “sync” of what the graphics is pushing, where as with Vsync you can be running at 60FPS and anything below that drops to 30FPS, Freesync works with anything within the stated range by the manufacturer. This is all a part of the VESA standard and does not cost a premium to the manufacturer, which allows Freesync enabled panels to remain cheaper than their Nvidia counterparts.

The other benefits include helping improve energy efficency when panel is static, and dynamically adapts the display refresh rate to fixed video content frame rate for a power efficient and stutter-free video playback with anything over 30FPS.