AMD Kaveri Arrives: A8-7600 APU Review
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 the A8-6500T, DDR3-2133 for the A10-6800K and A8-7600, and DDR3-1600 on the Intel systems. The solid state drives were then formatted, and Windows 8.1 x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. We then installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared any prefetch and temp data, and ran the tests.
ASUS A88X-Pro Socket FM2+ Motherboard
AMD provided a slick system built around an ASRock mini-ITX motherboard and Xigmatek case for testing, to show the kind of small form factors the A8-7600 was suited for, but in the absence of a similar setup for the comparison systems, we tested AMD's latest APU in a full-sized ATX motherboard from ASUS, the A88X-Pro you see pictured here.
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| System 1: AMD A10-6800K (4.1GHz - Quad-Core) AMD A8-6500T (3.5GHz - Quad-Core) AMD A8-7600 (3.8GHz/3.3GHz Quad-Core) Asus A88X-Pro (AMD A88 Chipset) 2x8GB AMD DDR3-2133 (@1866 with 6700) On-Processor Graphics On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio Samsung SSD 840 Pro Windows 8.1 x64 |
System 2: Intel Core i5-4670K (3.8GHz - Quad-Core) Intel Core i3-4330 (3.5GHz - Dual-Core + HT) Gigabyte Z87X-UD7 TH (Z87 Express Chipset) 2x8GB AMD DDR3-2133 (@1600 with Haswell) Intel HD 4600 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio Samsung SSD 840 Pro Windows 8.1 x64 |
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;) Processor Arithmetic |
;) Processor Multimedia |
;) Memory Bandwidth |
;) Cache and Memory |
According to SiSoft SANDRA, the A8-7600 offered up 44.4GOPS in aggregate, which put it ahead of some Ivy Bridge-based mobile Core i5 processors, but well behind some higher-end Intel offerings. Memory bandwidth peaked in the 14.72GB/s range, which in right in-line with other dual-channel AMD solutions running at a similar clock. SANDRA's cache and memory bandwidth test, however, showed the A8-7600 offering up more bandwidth than other solutions once the dataset range exceeded the 4MB mark. With smaller datasets, the A8-7600 performed about in the middle of the pack in the test.
