AMD A10 and A8 Trinity APU: Virgo Desktop Experience - Hot Hardware Hands-On

We're taking a somewhat different two-tiered approach with our coverage of AMD’s new Trinity-based APUs for desktop systems today. AMD is lifting the veil on their new product line-up, in addition to graphics performance and power consumption, but we can’t quite give you the full monty just yet, due to a new multi-tiered launch approach AMD decided to take with these products. If you want to see how well AMD’s latest desktop APUs overclock, how their processor cores perform, or how they’re priced, you’re going to have to stop by in a few more days. For now though, we’ve got graphics performance and power consumption characteristics to talk about and have some rather interesting side-by-side comparisons in store as well.

Although they’re based on the same piece of silicon, Trinity-based APUs for desktop systems have much more power and thermal headroom to play with versus their notebook-bound cousins. As such, the chips are clocked much higher, in regard to both their CPU and GPU cores. In fact, one of the chips we’ll be showing you here today, the A10-5800K, can Turbo all the way up to 4.2GHz.