What’s the price of an integrated GPU? About 50 bucks, apparently
The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that this isn't a brand new processor. The AMD Athlon X4 860K was originally released about a year ago, but has suddenly become a far more relevant processor than when it first launched.
It’s all about the money, as usual, as the cost of this AMD chip was recently cut in half. That makes it a far better option for a low-end, budget-oriented gaming machine, and we reckon you’re going to start seeing your friendly local (and not so local) system integrators putting together a host of micro machines rocking this cheap little chip. After all, if it costs us $75 to pick up a single unit, imagine the bulk order discounts for PC builders buying a whole tray of inexpensive silicon.
So, where has it come from? When chips are manufactured, inevitably there will be individual chips that don’t function to their full potential due to silicon imperfections. Some work fine at lower clock speeds; others have faulty functional units. AMD’s APUs contain both CPU and GPU components, and it makes sense to use chips where you can’t rely on the graphics side as straight processors.
That’s what happened with the 860K. Specifically, this is a “harvested” A10-7850K without the GPU bits. It’s a basic Steamroller chip, rocking two modules; AMD calls it a quad-core CPU, as it has four integer cores, with each module sharing a single floating point unit. It’s also the cheapest quad-core processor you can buy, about three-quarters the cost of AMD’s FX-4350.
There is an important caveat with this CPU though, and that's where you can use it. Because the 860K is a cut-down APU, it needs to run in an FM2+ motherboard, which means you don’t have the same access to all the high-end stuff. Though with this being more of a budget offering, that’s not an issue.
What might be an issue is that this is a dead end when it comes to your upgrade options down the line. This isn’t going to be the beating heart of a machine that will grow along with your CPU needs. The only processor upgrade you’ll be able to perform would be to change up to a fully functional A10-7850K, or an incrementally faster A10-7870K, but all that will get you is an integrated GPU. As we’re talking about this being a base for a budget gaming rig, the need for that weakheart graphics core is minimal at best.
The performance of the Athlon X4 860K is a known quantity. We’ve tested the A10 APU this is born from, and it performs almost identically. That’s great from the point of view that it’s up there with a pricier processor, but it means you "only" get the same performance as the A10. AMD APUs aren’t the chips of choice for most gamers, as they hobble the peak performance of any graphics card when compared with their performance alongside Intel processors.
That said, if you compare it with a similarly-priced, stock-clocked Pentium Anniversary G3258 chip, those "four" cores make a difference. The performance of the 860K’s extra cores and clock speed gives it the edge, and then there’s the fact that modern game engines are starting to need more than resolutely dual-core CPUs.
And what of overclocking? We managed to get a healthy 4.4GHz clock speed that seemed stable—unfortunately, when given a light Cinebench thrashing, it refused to hold, throttling its clocks right down. In the end, as the base for a real budget gaming build, this cheap quad-core chip is adequate, but nothing more. Dave James
SPECIFICATIONS
Socket AMD FM2+
Core Technology Steamroller
Clock Speed 3.7GHz
Boost 4GHz
Cores 4
Lithography 28nm
Cache 4MB
TDP 95W