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FINAL WORD AND ANALYSIS
What can we say that we haven’t already said in this article already? This has got to be one of the strongest offerings at the $100 mark. We can say that this APU is tailored for a living room PC, weither it be a HTPC type use, or perhaps as a Steambox, it can handle productivity pretty well given its price, and keeps up with CPUs twice its price.
We also feel that this thing is far and away the best option for those on a budget of $400 or below and makes a solid point slightly above that. The ability to play games like StarCraft 2, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, DOTA 2, League of Legends and other popular E-sports titles with integrated graphics is astonishing. It also keeps up with a very popular “Budget” CPU the i5 4430 in most tests which costs 80% more.
The fact that it handled a GPU as high end as the 290 was pretty impressive to us, what this APU gives us is a $100 solution to play most popular titles out the box, save your money and pop in a nice dedicated GPU and be able to play most games pretty well. This renders the Pentium G3258 obsolete in most cases, and as we see the A8 isn’t too far behind the i5 we see recommended on /r/buildapc on reddit. From what we’ve seen here for a real performance improvement you would need to spend much more, and frankly for most users, the difference in the other CPUs we’ve tested isn’t worth the extra money.
The part where this gets tricky is when someone is building a custom PC with a bit more room in their budget and planning on buying a $110 to $260 GPU at that point we are losing on a key point that makes this APU so strong. The Athlon 860K may be a solid alternative or the AMD FX 6300 the latter being a bit long in the tooth, but having two extra cores. While the i5 4430 did well, and beat the a8 7650K in a lot of tests we couldn’t get over the fact that it cost another $80 we would sooner see that money being spent on a better GPU, case, PSU or an SSD.
When it is all said and done, the A8 7650K from AMD is a swiss army knife of a CPU, everything we could throw at it, within reason and it handled without missing a beat, from streaming CS:GO with barely any performance drop, to productivity in LibreOffice, and Handbrake, it seriously surprised us! So with that we give it our coveted Top Value Award!
CHECK OUT THE AMD A8 7650K ON AMAZON!
Review Overview
Performance
Overclocking
Price
Warranty
Very Strong Value CPU
When it is all said and done, the A8 7650K from AMD is a swiss army knife of a CPU at a great value! It seriously surprised us and was well deserving of our Top Value Award!
I have been using the A6 4400 for two years and have been able to play everything from crisis 2 to dayz to battlefield 3 at normal settings and never had an issue till it started overheating recently. I am planning to replace the thermal paste and have been debating an upgrade to an A8 or an A10. These processors are amazing.
I remember the old trinity’s were great in laptops back a few years ago.
I was really happy with the performance on this processor. If you plan on buying a Processor from amazon be sure to use our link to support us!
if it overheats on you, how is that amazing? once thermal paste is applied you should never have to reapply. it should be a permanent install..
Factory thermal paste has a lifespan of 2 years. I am adding mx4 which has a lifespan of 6 years. It’s in an HP laptop which is famous for running hot. Currently to prevent overheating I dialed down the CPU.
Thermal paste dries out. If you’ve ever owned a laptop you would notice after about 2 years they tend to get much hotter. That is one of the main contributing factors.
If AMD wishes to have any chance to capture market share, they better start looking outside the US in terms of what importers and distributers are doing to their prices. When I have to pay an equivalent of around 200USD for the A10-7850K, then there are more sensible Intel buys. But AMD doesn’t seem to care that their distribution channels are killing their sales in non US markets.
Sorry to hear that, it is rather unfortunate that pricing is so high in your country.
I’ll bring this up next time I speak to someone at AMD. I am very sorry to hear that 🙁
a little late to the party but its the same in my country. they even jacked up the prices a month ago when the aots benchmark came out and then they made promos on intel / NVidia. amd also rarely gets promo. there are bundled offers but it sucks like an a10-7850k with an apotop 2gb 1333 ram. bunch of idiots go buy it without researching the importance of ram to the apu then they flood the forum saying it sucked and that they would never buy amd again.
well written! would have been nice to see 4 more compute cores in action. could use another 1080p budget gamer. it would be more compelling to buy fm2+ if there was a road map or to know there was at least 1 more upgrade coming that will be more competitive in aaa games. i could realistically see a road map for a small form factor with hbm for the apu and maybe integrated on the board. they could make ones the size of game systems and release a few new chips every year or the top end one anyway. i mean why not if memory wont hold you back.
As far as we can tell the next CPUs will be on the upcoming Zen stuff on a different platform.
It is still a solid deal.
yeah actually seen a road map in a article not long after i wrote that.
im curious to know what temps did you guys run into while testing this chip? on mine, im using a zalman 9700 and its running temps around 60c. i had to clock it down and also run it in 65w mode to get it to cool down. however it locks up when the temp peaks over the 65 w mode. i do want to use a hyper 212 evo to see if the temps drop.
I’d check out some of the other coolers we’ve reviewed here. I used the hyper 212 evo simply because it was there and very popular. The temps I ran into were about 30/40C below the throttle point so about 50C.
If you dont mind the extra $20 a Phanteks cooler we reviewed here https://www.technologyx.com/featured/phanteks-ph-tc14s-cpu-cooler-review/
Beat the snot out of a hyper 212.
Thanks very much for the feedback!