AMD A10 and A8 Trinity APU: Virgo CPU Performance

Name: AMD A10-5800K APU
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta and Dave Altavilla — Tuesday, October 02, 2012, 12:01 AM EDT

Test Setup and SiSoft SANDRA

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes or UEFIs and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS/UEFI and set the memory speed to each platform's maximum, officially supported speed--DDR3-1866 in the case of Virgo. The solid state drives were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared any prefetch and temp data, and ran the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems

Intel and AMD - Head To Head

System 1:
AMD A10-5800K
(3.8GHz - Quad-Core)
AMD A8-5600K
(3.6GHz - Quad-Core)

Asus F2A85-M Pro
(AMD A85 Chipset)

2x4GB Corsair DDR3-1866

Radeon HD 7660D/7560D
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

Windows 7 x64

System 2:
Intel Core i5-3470
(3.2GHz - Quad-Core)
Intel Core i3-3220/3225
(3.3GHz - Dual-Core)

MSI Z77A-GD65
(Z77 Express Chipset)

2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866

Intel HD 2500/4000
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

Windows 7 x64

System 3:
AMD A8-3870K
(3.0GHz - Quad-Core)

Asus F1A75-V Pro
(AMD A75 Chipset)

2x4GB Corsair DDR3-1866
(@ 1866MHz)

Radeon HD 6550D IGP
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

Windows 7 x64

System 4:
AMD FX 8150
(3.6GHz Eight-Core)

Asus CrossHair V Formula
(AMD 990FX Chipset)

2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866
(@ 1866MHz)

GeForce GTX 280
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

Windows 7 x64

SiSoftware SANDRA 2012

Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2012, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2012 suite with AMD's latest APUs (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Cache and Memory). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processors running at their default clock speeds with 8GB of DDR3-1866 RAM running in dual-channel mode on an Asus F2A85-M Pro motherboard.

AMD A10-5800K: Processor Benchmark	AMD A10-5800K: Multimedia Benchmark
AMD A10-5800K: Memory Bandwidth Benchmark	AMD A10-5800K: Cache Latency Benchmark
AMD A8-5600K: Processor Benchmark	AMD A8-5600K: Multimedia Benchmark
AMD A8-5600K: Memory Bandwidth Benchmark	AMD A8-5600K: Cache Latency Benchmark

Despite their new architecture and much higher base and Turbo frequencies, the AMD A10-5800K and A8-5600K offer only marginal improvements in performance over previous-gen products according to SANDRA. As the processor and multimedia benchmarks show, the A10-5800K and A8-5600K are only marginally faster than a Phenom II X4 965 and hang with older Core 2 Quads. Memory bandwidth is in the 11.1 - 11.4GB/s range, and like Bulldozer-based FX-Series processors, cache latency is unfortunately much higher than previous-gen products.