Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and today were talking about AMD's 810 7870 ka pu this is the new apu that's been a refresh to the 7850 k so this is sort of familiar to their recent are 300 series refresh of the are 200 series in that it's not an architectural update to the existing Kaveri platform but it enhances it by doing a couple of things like clock rate increases and that's really primarily where the changes with the eight ten seven eight seventy K so a couple of things and then we'll jump into the specs and bench market and all that the 810 78 70 K is generally priced at about $150 on Amazon or other retailers online I've seen it for $120 there is a one-day sale where you hit that low so that is something we'll keep in mind during the conclusion but at 150 that's what you should expect to pay for it on average so jumping straight into the specs here the a10 7870 k is an AMD APU that means it has integrated graphics on it unlike the athlon x4 series which effectively takes these chips and disables the IGP component so the integrated graphics uses an r7 graphics processor and with AMD CPUs that takes about 50% of the die so it's really quite a lot of the total die size is dedicated to the IGP and four other specs the 7870 K is effectively identical to the 7850 K except for clock rate so it's got four CPU cores eight GPU cores it uses r7 graphics and the 7870 K is a four point one gigahertz turbo clock and 3.9 gigahertz base and the 70 50 K is 4.0 and 3.7 so that's a point one difference on the turbo and point two difference on the base clock and then it's got the same cache four megabytes of l2 but the GPU is overclocked actually somewhat reasonably it goes to eight 66 megahertz from 720 megahertz on the 7850 K so that is a fairly reasonable overclock that is more than 100 megahertz that's 146 megahertz OC on the GPU component the a-10 70 is 70 K APU is an FM 2 plus socket at sugar goes into fm2 plus boards and it also uses the Kaveri platform so that means the same chipsets associated with Kaveri eight views and the Richland and Kaveri CPUs will be used here so that would be a Dax at the high end for your primary chipset that allows for overclocking and crossfire SLI things like that this apu is on the same nomenclature that Andy launched a number of years ago the bulldozer piledriver steamroller initiative it's using the steamroller architecture and steamroller advanced AMD is positioning for IPC and single threaded performance which is something that bulldozer and piledriver were really not very good at so steamroller did advance those things this is all kind of old news at this point we're just recapping what's happened up till now and AMD's steamroller architecture is still very much an arithmetic and integer powered arc it's much better at arithmetic processing and compute and this remains true with their GPUs as well if you look at the Fiji architecture it's really quite impressive for compute it has a huge shader array and that's something we discuss in the fury X review if you're curious what all that is about so that continues with the AP use but that means that they're not necessarily inherently that great at gaming so that's what we're benchmarking here we're trying to see a few things one at what point does the CPU component of the 7870 cave bottleneck when we couple it with a high end GPU or mid-range GPU and to how well do the integrated graphics perform for gaming so that would include csgo and dota testing at the low end and then three we coupled the competing processors at a very low price point with an appropriate dedicated or discrete GPU solution D GPU so that would be the G three to five eight at $65 plus the $96 now deprecated r7 250x and the seven sixty K which has been replaced by the 860 K which is a $75 processor coupled with the same r7 250x so those two solutions are ten to twenty dollars more than the 7870 K which is becoming a decent jump at the twenty dollar more price point that would be the AMD solution but the Intel is only $10 more and is something that we'll investigate as an alternative let's dive into the benchmarks here and see how the apu performs we're going to start with the IGP performance using the art 7 graphics processor the 78 70 K isn't that bad at csgo on Ultra or dota 2 on medium settings this is about where the 70 at so many K's GPU belongs for performance and it's not great but it's certainly playable at about 60 fps or a little more in some cases and that said the 780 Tony K is rapidly outpaced by the CPU plus d GPU solutions by nearly 2x in GTA 5 the G 3 2 5 8 looks playable at an average FPS of more than 70 in some instances but has a dismal 0.1% low of 4 that makes for a jarring and unpleasant experience this is exactly why we test frame time variants and in this instance you're going to want to opt for the slower average FPS and the 760 K + d GPU solution over the g3 - 5/8 strictly because of this performance at 0.1% lows and that is a threading issue looking at CPU performance only by coupling a 980ti with the CPUs we see where GPU bottlenecks exist in certain games on the cpus the 78 Sony K is outpaced readily by the 41 60 which is actually a cheaper CPU at $117 and to this end if you're buying mid-range or higher-end GPUs and coupling them with a mid $100 CPU for instance it makes better sense to buy an i3 or cheap I 5 then the 78 70 K the 78 70 K is just not designed to be used as a CPU exclusive solution you're basically throwing out 50% of the die immediately that's dedicated to graphics because you're replacing it with something significantly better that can't be coupled using and these dual graphics architecture the 78 70 K does well in one place and one place only and that is with games like csgo dota and mole and if you're playing any one of those games you actually get about a 2x performance increase by opting for AMD zone 760 or 860 k+ d GPU now that is a ten to twenty dollar jump in price so that is certainly of note if that's absolutely unaffordable then the sony at sony k is really not bad at low end games like csgo dota and all but in general it's going to worth spending the extra at least ten to twenty because you get a huge gain in graphics performance you're going to be able to play other games like GTA 5 on normal where the 70 at 70 K would not be able to tolerate those games without a G GPU on its own to this end there are only a few primary use cases for the 78 70 K and those would be in foreign markets where the price disparity is much different and in the Asian market I know the 78 Sony K is priced much differently and potentially more affordable I'm really not familiar with that market that is one target that AMD could be going after and the second the use case would be in odd unique form factor builds where you're building in an enclosure that doesn't even allow for a GP of any kind it doesn't have any expansion slots and a few of those boxes exist Silverstone makes a few they're basically HTPC boxes that resemble a DVR and don't even have room for ad GPU but a lot of them at this point do they just rotate the GP and use a an expansion slot that extends to the GP wherever it is so it's an interesting market the 7870 K is not particularly good against the competition but it is fairly impressive from a graphic standpoint stand alone so the csgo dota and mobile performance are all very good you can play all those games on the 7870 K in general we would strongly advise builders who are using a tight budget to investigate the option of an 860 k plus the d GPU at the low end rather than a 787 TK if you absolutely can't afford that $20 the g 3 to 5 8 is not a bad consideration just keep in mind that the 0.1% lows on the Intel g3 2 5 8 dual-core processor are pretty bad in some games like GTA that are heavily multi-threaded but in those games generally the 78 70 K would not be a good performer at so that's another thing to keep in mind so if Andy drops the price more permanently to about $120 which is where we saw it during a brief sale online then it becomes a much more viable platform it's it's something that is much easier to recommend because at 120 you have now a thirty to forty dollar price gap at some ends between the DGP plus CPU solutions and that begins to put your build into another price category altogether so 120 if you see it for that and you're trying to save a lot of money and build something that basically exists only to play games like dota and csgo and maybe do your media management like a TV HD PC or something then this is an OK processor to consider but in any other use case very heavily consider the option of D GPU + CPU and even AMD zone 860 K is better with a DGP than this solution so it's not like we're saying just by Intel because that's not the case here so that is all for this review check out the link in the description below for the full review all the charts things like that and please consider looking into our patreon campaign that's something we've been pushing lately and we're trying to use it to leverage the viewer base to eliminate some of our reliance upon traditional advertising as a means for generating revenue and creating content because that gives us a lot more freedom to continue being objective and critical in the way that we are so check that out if you are interested in like our content but only in those instances and I will see you all next time