A10 7800, a new locked FM2+ APU. This new APU from AMD has 12 compute cores split between 4 CPU and 8 GPU. The Kaveri cores are clocked at 3.5GHz it can go up to a 3.9GHz with Turbo, and the GPU clock speed is 720MHz. The APU has a TDP of 65W making this a great choice for those wanting to build an energy efficient build. These would be well suited to a HTPC or entry level build. Today the 7800 will be put through its paces and see how it performs.
AMD A10 7800 APU – Bottom
Test System
- AMD A10 7800
- MSI A88X G45-GAMING
- Team Vulcan DDR3 2400 2x8GB
- Mushkin Chronos 240GB
- Silverstone Strider 1KW PSU
- Cooler Master TPC 812 cooler
- Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
The 7800 is a locked chip which makes this a good choice for those who are not looking to overclock the big brother; the 7850K as it will save some money and be close in performance. The GPU is overclockable which is nice since you can easily make it run over 1000MHz, thus gaining a lot of performance. The 7800 accommodates up to 2133MHz DDR3 and is capable of going over that when you overclock.
PCMARK 8
AIDA64 – Memory Benchmark
The performance is very good for something that is low power and an in an entry to mid-level tier. Playing Borderlands 2 at 1080p with great frame rates was a nice surprise, though it did take a bit of settings optimization. Media playback was very smooth when playing media files with multiple filters that leveraged the GPUs. One of the best uses of the 7800 is definitely going to be as a HTPC where heavy graphics load isn’t going to be used. It would be well suited to playing not as demanding games on the tv if used in that way.
3DMARK Benchmarks
Overclocking the 7800 was easily done by driving up the bus speed to 106 from 100; this also increased the RAM speed to 2260. The 106 bus speed was the max stable speed that was found, though 107.5 was achievable but was very unstable. This chip will overclock even better when put under sub-zero temps. On hwbot.org a speed of 4154MHz (119.45 bus speed) was achieved by Delly using a single stage phase change cooler on the same motherboard model. The GPU was easily pushed to 1018MHz with a little bump in GPU voltage.
Would I buy it?
This would definitely be on my personal shopping list for the heart of a HTPC build. The processor has a TDP 65W which is lower than that of the 7850K at 95W which is nice when you are looking to build a low wattage system. The price is also a nice factor since at $161,and being an APU you won’t need to spend extra money to play some of the latest games with acceptable frame-rates. If you are looking to tweak the system the 7850K would be the one to buy as it is unlocked at only a $8 premium. If not worried about things like power draw, then I would strongly recommend the 7850K as it will be easy to achieve overclocks of 4.5GHz for a great gain in performance.
