When it comes to budget systems, AMD's APUs have remained fairly competitive against Intel's offerings, mostly due to the latter's poor ICP performance. With half-decent Radeon CPUs under their hoods, 1080p gaming has certainly been possible with some of the more recent APUs, and AMD has now released another flagship to the A10 line-up - the A10-7870K.
Being a K-series APU, you can of course adjust the multiplier when overclocking; the non-K-edition version of the CPU was actually launched last year. The 7870K's direct predecessor, the A10-7850K, hit the shelves at the beginning of 2014, and the new APU, codenamed Godavari, is essentially a speed-bumped version of this APU.
It offers a 200 MHz boost to the CPU frequency, rising from a base frequency of 3.7CHz to 3.9CHz, with a maximum Turbo frequency of 4.1GHz. There's a hefty 146MHz bump to the Radeon R7-based CPU too, rising from 720MHz in the A10-78S0K to 866MHz in the A10-7870K.
It still uses 28nm Steamroller cores too - the same cores found in the Kaveri chips - and the TDP remains the same at 9SW as well. The A10-7870K also supports dual-graphics setups, whereby you can pair a discrete CPU in a hybrid form of CrossFire to boost 3D performance. However, as with the A10-7850K, the most powerful CPU you can pair with the new APU is a Radeon R7 250.
Like its predecessors, the A10-7870K has four integer units and two floating point units, so in some tasks, it's effectively a quad-core CPU, potentially giving it a lead over similarly priced Intel dual-core CPUs in multi-threaded tests. Thankfully, AMD has also introduced the APU at a lower price point compared with the launch prices of the A10-7800 and A10-7850K, both of which retailed for over £120 inc VAT at launch.
As a result, these top-end APUs were competing with fairly powerful Core i3 CPUs in terms of price, while much cheaper Intel CPUs could be paired with a discrete graphics card for not much more money.
At £107 inc VAT, the A10-7870K is already in a much better place, although it needs to be if early online benchmarks of Intel's new Iris Pro graphics are an accurate yardstick - for the first time, it looks as though Intel has a competitive integrated graphics system. Until Broadwell CPUs actually appear, though, AMD's top-end APUs are still the best bet if you want a CPU and CPU in one chip.
As with its Kaveri predecessors, though, the new A10-7870K will only work in a Socket FM2+ motherboard, so if you're upgrading from a Richland or Llano APU, you'll need a new motherboard too.
Performance
Our test kit comprised 8GB of 2,133MHz DDR3 memory and an MSI A88X-G45 Gaming motherboard, while for the Intel Pentium G3258, we used its on-board Intel HD Graphics to obtain game benchmark results. As the FX-8370E lacks integrated graphics, we've only included it in the 2D benchmarks.
In all our tests, the A10-7870K was noticeably quicker than the A10-78S0K, although the gains weren't massive. For example, the AMD reference score is only 3.5 per cent higher than our78S0K-based reference system. In game tests, the difference was only a couple of frames per second too, although this boost did equate to an increase of up to 6 percent in some cases.
Comparison with the Pentium G3258 was interesting though. It's a much cheaper CPU, but it’s clearly worth paying extra for the APU if you're looking for a cheap but well-balanced general-purpose PC. In all but the image editing test, where Intel's superior instructions per clock performance counts for more, the 7870K beat the Pentium. The latter was also dire in games, and its comparatively inferior GPU was shown up in our LuxMark OpenCL test too. It had a big edge in power consumption, though, with our Pentium test system drawing less than half the wattage of our AMD APU system under load.
Overclocking the A10-7870K was very easy, mostly due to the fact the vcore has been set fairly high by default, with CPU-Z reporting it to be a lofty 1.48V. Needless to say, you won't need to increase this vcore much to find a maximum overclock. We eventually settled on 4.6GHz using the default vcore, while also increasing the CPU frequency from 866MHZ to 900M Hz. In fact, the vcore was set so high that at 4.4GHz we managed to reduce it to 1.44V and still have a stable system.
Once overclocked, the A10-7870K saw sizeable gains in all our benchmarks, with the system score rising from 58,106 to, 65,894 and 10 per cent or more being added to the minimum frame rate in the game tests too. The Pentium, which was overclocked to 4.2GHz, still held a hefty lead in the image editing test, but despite huge gains itself, it still failed to topple the A10-7870K in the video encoding test.
When overclocked, the Pentium's on-board graphics were still awful in games too, resulting in a stuttery mess even at low settings. The overclocked Pentium again won out when it comes to power consumption though.
Conclusion
While there's nothing particularly new about the A10-7870K, apart from increased clock speeds, it enters the market at a more competitive price than its predecessors. It's noticeably quicker at stock speed than the A10-7850K, speed than the A10-7850K, and the higher vcore allows for easier overclocking too. However, it also runs hot and consumes a lot of power, especially when compared with Intel CPUs.
In addition, the A10-7850K is still readily available, and costs £10 less than the 7870K, so it's still a good choice for an all purpose on a budget. The other factor, of course, is Intel's Broadwell and Skylake CPUs with Iris Pro graphics. At the moment, AMD's A10-7870K is the king of all-in-one chips, but it could soon be up against some very stiff competition. ANTONY LEATHER
VERDICT
A little quicker than the A10-7850K and easy to overclock, but not a lot else has changed.
SPECIFICATIONS
Frequency 3.9GHz
Core Godavari (Steamroller)
Manufacturing process 28nm
Number of cores 4x physical
Cache L1: 2 x 96KB 3-way shared, 4 x 16KB 4-way, L2: 2 x 2MB shared
Memory controller Dual-channel DDR3, up to 2,133MHz
Packaging Socket FM2+
Thermal Design Power (TDP) 95W
Features SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4a, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, 256-bit AVX, AESNI, PCLMULQDQ, AMD64, Cool'n'Quiet 3.0, AMD-V, MMX, FMA4, FM3, F16C, XOP, Turbo Core 3.0