AMD A10 7870K CPU Review – Welcoming Competition!

TECHNOLOGY X TESTING PROTOCOL

At Technology X, we test our CPUs slightly different depending upon the product’s marketed purpose, whether it be an entry-level budget processor or a high-end workstation CPU. Our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, however, CPU C State alteration may or may not have occurred depending on the motherboard and BIOS configurations. Additionally, we also try to include links to the benchmarks used in our report so that you as the reader can replicate our tests to confirm that your system performs the way it should.

Today we are putting 2 of the most common CPUs we see people recommend on the “Budget” side, those two are the Pentium G3258 and the i5 4430, while the i3 would be worthy to throw into this test, we don’t often see many i3’s “in the wild” as they say, we have seen a rise in many of the i5 4430s because of the lower price. We have also seen many people make the case that the higher clock speed variants of the i5 “don’t add more performance.” or in the case of the Pentium G3258 that “dual cores are fine for games”. Well today, we are going to lay those claims to rest.

TECHNOLOGY X TEST BENCH 

All of the components we use for testing are standard off-the-shelf PC components from major manufacturers, which can be purchased at a variety of local retailers and online. We’ll also provide links to our components for those of you that find an interest in our equipment.

We’d like to thank AMD, Gigabyte, NZXT, Be Quiet and Plextor for providing vital components in this test bench, without which this report would not be possible. Look out for our separate review of the Gigabyte F2A88X-UP4 used in this report, coming soon!

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE 

When we test various PC hardware, we like to use benchmarks that are readily available for you to download and test for yourself. In our analysis today we will be using FutureMark’s PCMark 8 and Maxon’s Cinebench 15, while also measuring the performance of the processor while running a variety of games and applications. During the game tests we run FRAPS, which is a useful tool for measuring and logging the FPS (frames per second) a game is running at and for recording video footage of the gameplay

CINEBENCH 15

Maxon’s Cinebench is a benchmarking tool based on their Cinema 4D software. It measures CPU performance by rendering a photo realistic 3D scene. We test our CPU using it in both single and multicore modes to determine performance gains in multi-threaded tasks.

As we see here our i5 takes a significant lead over our A10 7870K, coming in at about 20% faster, although for another $50 it may not be worth it for most users. The Pentium has quite good results remaining very competitive with CPUs twice its price at this overclock.

HANDBRAKE

In our handbrake tests we’ll be using a very early build which was provided to us by AMD. In this build, AMD has worked closely with the software developers to enable OpenCL in order to allow the software to take advantage of the extra processing power afforded by the integrated graphics on the APU.

Yet again the Intel CPUs take the top and bottom of the board, with AMD’s offerings sitting a bit behind the i5, in this test we see the A10 not getting much of a boost from the overclock, most likely because of the lower overclock on the iGPU, we’d wager a higher GPU clock would have helped more.

STANDARD TEST

For this test we tested using the current public version of Handbrake.

Our A10 keeps up the pace with the higher priced i5 although losing by 8% at stock and about 2% once overclocked. Although the best value here is the A8 7650K once OC’d