Gadgetory


All Cool Mind-blowing Gadgets You Love in One Place

AMD Athlon X4 880K Review & Benchmark vs. i3, APUs

2016-04-19
md's x4 80k is its new flagship Athlon cpu and like other Athlon cpus in the past it is effectively an APU with the IGP disabled that's the internal graphics part of the die is actually off so this is a bit different than the 70 at 70 K 7 8 9 TK in just one way and that's the IGP but otherwise it's sort of the same architecture same frequency setup same core set up very similar overall the main difference though for you as a consumer is that if you don't want that IGP you can look at the Athlon series as an option and that reduces the price to an MSRP of $95 with this x4 8 80 K versus 165 dollars for the 78 90 K at a bit lower for the 78 70 K so that's what we're looking at today is basically does this thing work when paired with a d GPU how does it compete with the APS and how does it compete with Intel's i3 the athlon x4 a 80k uses am these excavator architecture which is the last line of Andy's old architectures until Zen ships later this year the 880 K uses the FM 2 Plus socket type and will generally work best for overclocking with the a 88x chipset motherboards as with all case q CPUs from both AMD and Intel right now the ATK has unlocked clock rate multipliers and overclocking abilities when coupled with a chipset prepared for overclocking the ATK is comparable to the AMD a10 7890 ka pu which is a $165 chip and the athlon x4 ATK runs at 2 modules and 4 cores the clock rate is 4.20 24.2 gigahertz boosted and the a 10-7 890 K for comparison runs a four point one to four point three gigahertz clock rate so it's 100 megahertz faster and hosts 8 r7 compute units with 512 streaming processors for graphics the 80k does not have the graphics component and that's the major difference and it's also a 95 watt TDP chip paired with AMD's 125 watt near-silent cooler for comparison the 7890 K is the Wraiths cooler which we reviewed previously in a full video our last few APU reviews have basically so that the a ATK is the chip to watch out for and it's finally here the reason we've been saying the lookout for it is because the AP use although they're powerful in their own right maybe for a 300 dollar rig or something similar it really doesn't make a lot of sense as sort of a core game or to get an APU even if you're on an ultra budget because when you can spend sixty to ninety dollars on something like this or Intel's previously the G three to five eight which we no longer recommend but when you can buy something like that and pair it with maybe even an 80 or 90 dollar GPU d GPU like a 250 X or 340 or something like that the performance difference is massive and it makes a lot more sense as a gamer to go the route of a cheaper dedicated CPU and a cheaper d GPU than a more expensive single APU unit which will generally underperform for the types of games that our audience tries to play even when looking at APU performance versus lower-class chips with a 250 X which is about as cheap as you can get for a reasonable D GPU or the 340 or 759 ti the 250 X it blows the APS away and no competition in some instances between the d GPU and the apu set up some of these older charts that you can see now show what you're looking at from the 78 60 k review and that's basically the raw power gain from even a low-end d GPU liked the 250 X to the AP use and these charts don't include the 80 K but we'll get to that momentarily we tested the 80 K it for gaming performance overclocking and thermals and we're going to start with thermals today the andy apu products are tough to get an accurate reading from most of the usual tools don't work or don't work well and the per core readings are often inaccurate depending on which software you're using so that presents a methodology challenge our current thermal bench for the AMD cpus and the AP use is limited but it's growing with each review and the x-48 ATK with its stock heatsink runs cooler than both the 7870 k and sony 860 K when each is paired with their stock coolers it's a surprisingly cool chip aided by the fact that a large portion of the die which would be the IGP components of the APU is disabled from use and these athlon x4 a 80 K uses what AMD calls its 125 watt near silent or ns cooler and that's the same as is found stocked with the 78 70 K and 78 60 K the Wraiths is only found on the 78 9 DK which is new and some of the FX 83-70 chips for framerate testing we try to provoke a CPU bottleneck by pairing these lower end CPUs with a 980ti and then we also pair them with a low-end card like a 250 X and that's for comparison against the AP use you can see all the charts in the article linked in the description below but we'll go through a couple of them here provoking a CPU bottleneck helps us understand the total raw output potential of a CPU without artificial limitations imposed by other components for just the CPU performance charts we'll start off with Metro last light note that Metro last light is uniquely picky about threads and will present poor 0.1% low metrics for just about every CPU shy of those with eight available threads like the i7 hyper threaded CPUs at 1080p the athlon x4 80k predictably performs equally to the a-10 7870 k being a simplified version of the $135 7870 ka pu there's a clear CPU bottleneck established when we look to the i-5 6600 K as a control which pushes nearly 96 FPS average the i3 6300 priced at $150 eats into the performance a bit with a 14.5 percent performance difference against the 6600 K and the athlon x4 8 80k suffers a 44% performance difference when matched against the i3 6300 though the Intel CPU fairly is priced $50 higher it doesn't make any sense really to opt for the IGP options here the APS considering these first tests couple of DGP with the cpus and we can see that the AP use output about equal cpu performance they're all sort of tied with the X 480 K substantially cheaper than the APU options there's no noteworthy gain over the older 760 K in this particular benchmark though that does change in a few other tests shadow of mordor is one of those the old x4 760 k performs at 74 FPS average a 13 point 8 percent difference from the new x4 8 80 K the AP is fall in between these Athlon chips and the 70k again is effectively tied no reason really to buy that if buying DGP you because i mean just looking at these benchmarks you pretty much see why you wouldn't want the AP you it's all about the same cv performance the AMD devices are bottlenecking when compared to an i3 6300 again $150 and there's a 31.7% difference between them but the AMD devices are still exceeding 60 FPS at 1080p with the GPU we've chosen and our reasonable gaming ships for their price and again to be fair this is a worst case scenario to 980ti which realistically you would never pair with an 80 k grid Autosport is one of the most sensitive games we have when it comes to cpu frequency and thread count changes and without moving into the i7 range the most powerful CPU on this bench pushes a hundred and thirty FPS average in the form of the 6600 k the 6300 sees reduction of fifteen point eight percent but it's still above the 100 FPS mark at 1080p and then we hit a giant wall and the AMD chips start to reach a fter the 60 FPS range the x4 760 case it's at 59 fps and is championed by the 880 k with a nine point six percent delta massive bottleneck overall but if you're looking to get a sub $100 CPU and a similarly priced d GPU maybe a 750ti or r-73 7 maximally then the pairing makes sense for the price as a whole we've got a couple other charts for GTA 5 dirt rally and the witcher 3 all of which will appear briefly on screen but check the article in the description below for more information on these individually and to learn about what our thoughts were on the results next is overclocking the 80k isn't as hot and overclocker as some of a.m. these FX chips several of which can hit the 5 gigahertz mark pretty easily but it does boast room for overclocking gains we were able to achieve a maximum clock rate of 4.6 gigahertz on the ATK prior to irresolvable instability and the performance disparity is generally minimal depending on game most games show about a 5 to 10 percent performance gain but on average sit around 7 percent faster in terms of frame rate when translating from the 4.6 gigahertz clock rate not too impressive overall certainly not impressive compared against some of am these older ships this isn't something I would recommend buying if you really want to get deep into overclocking and play around with high clock rates but it is still easy to work with you don't have to make major voltage changes to get that 4.6 gigahertz and it's worth playing around with if you're curious about overclocking at a top level but don't want to really push the CPU until it melts or dies don't expect enough frames to increase your bottom line on graphics settings with this overclocking for the a 80k though so is the 80 K worth it well it's in an interesting spot in the market sort of above it is the i3 range of Intel and Intel's got that pretty on lock at the 130 to 150 dollar price point from the i3 standpoint they perform very well in some games there's like a 40% gap between this and the i3 that we tested but that's a $50 price gap so you've gotta weigh that and with that in mind the place to look then is down so down the skew line there's an Andy 860 K and 870 K and the 860 K is the one that interests me the most because it's priced at about $80 this is supposed to be 95 ish but it's generally 100 105 on Newegg and amazon right now and that means that the 30 ish dollar gap 20 to 35 dollars between the 860 K and the 80 K is pretty significant if I were building a machine that's sort of a budget low spec gaming rig and I wanted to devote as much money as possible to the GPU what I would probably do is buy an 860 K because you'll see fairly similar performance to this especially if you look at the 760 K that we benchmarked now we didn't have an 860 K for the bench to be fair but the 760 K is a good indicator performance it falls between there and here and I'm going to be buying an 860 K out of pocket in the future so that I can actually post a review of that with the team but that's that stated and out of the way the 860 K makes better sense financially for a lot of budget builds you can take that extra $30 and buy a significantly bolstered GPU you might be moving from a 750 Ti or r7 370 card up to something that's more like maybe a 959 60 maybe a 383 ATX something in there and that's a pretty big gain and you will actually get use out of that jump the next thing to note the 880 K as it stands the loan is pretty solid it's it's something that you would buy certainly instead of an APU if you're trying to build a sort of quote-unquote proper gaming rig with a D GPU in it there's really no reason for you to buy an APU if you're going to throw a video card in there and this is where you would go for the flagship end the top end of that non APU spectrum from AMD in the budget class that's where you would certainly be falling still I would be looking at the 860 K as my primary budget class CPU and then after that I guess this fits in the middle range where if you've got enough to buy this and a decent GPU but not enough to buy an e i3 and a decent GPU you would buy this but otherwise I would be either 860 K camp or sort of low-end I three camp just depending on what I'm trying to do with my rig so overall this performance pretty well the thermals are reasonable ash pretty good the game performance is reasonable it's equal to the APS that we've tested those are really generally unexcited in terms of the gaps between the AP US and this CPU they're all really within one to three FPS of each other and that's not exciting to talk about but it does mean that they're consistent and it does mean that there's really no reason to buy those for in some cases thirty sixty dollars more than this thing this makes much better sense for you as a DGP user but you know 30 bucks you get an ASIC CK still pretty darn good there's a difference of a couple hundred megahertz in the clock rate that's really where you're paying for the gains in this thing for the most part so if you wanted something that's similar to this what I would suggest 860 K overclock and a tiny bit if you feel like you can do it and call it a day that's a pretty darn good setup and you do save a bit of money put it towards a better GPU so that is the conclusion on this overall not bad not as exciting as I was hoping it would be when looking at the AP use because you know same architecture so had a bit higher hopes but did not disappoint too severely where we're condemning it it's just right in the middle there between an Andy product 860 K and an Intel product i3 that's where I stand on it so as always patreon link the post roll video you can check the link in the description below for the article that covers this in full depth maybe a bit more than we got here thank you for watching I'll see you all next time
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.