AMD A10 7870K CPU Review – Welcoming Competition!

STARCRAFT 2: HEART OF THE SWARM

While Blizzard’s iconic RTS title may be getting a bit long in the tooth, it is still one of the most popular RTS’s out today.

Again, you guessed it the AMD integrated GPUs take the cake again, we do notice our overclock on the A10 7870K seems to make the biggest difference here, almost doubling the minimum frame rate, we would imagine this has to do with a CPU bottleneck during the heaviest part of our benchmark with tons of banlings crashing into a Terran army.

Aside from the brief point of massive action the game very similar to most of my games on ladder and the addition of Freesync really made a huge difference.

GRAND THEFT AUTO V

One of the most highly-anticipated releases for PC, GTA V is the latest installment of Rockstar’s long-running genre-defining open-world shooter, and it is their most graphically demanding title yet! with massive city that’s brought to life with immense detail.

For this test, we use the lowest settings in DX11 available for as close to playable performance as possible.

GTA V shows us the difference between playable and unplayable, from the i5 and Pentium. They are both quite limited by their IGPs (We’d imagine Broadwell or Skylake would fare better but there are currently no Skylake chips priced below $200 now)

It comes as no surprise our A10 7870K takes the lead once again, tripling the Pentium and i5. The A8 is no slouch either and stays within single digit percentage points.

At 720P we see the results are much closer although the A10 7870k stock and overclocked never drop below 30FPS, quite a feat considering its simply just integrated graphics. The i5 was somewhat playable at these settings, although definitely not an enjoyable experience.

DEDICATED GRAPHICS TESTS

At this point in our testing, we’ll be adding Crysis 3, Tomb Raider, Call Of Duty:AW, The Witcher 3 and revisiting GTA V.

We choose to add a AMD R9 290 for our tests, to have a overkill scenario we wouldn’t recommend putting a 290, or say a GTX 970 in any of these systems since the CPUs will be limiting the GPU in some games, we wanted to test how limited these CPUs would be. In the case of the i5 or APU, we would recommend something along the lines of a R9 285, or GTX 960 which would make a lot of sense.

CRYSIS 3

Crytek’s final installment in the Crysis trilogy is easily their most graphically ambitious release, and even though it is now a few years old, it still represents the bleeding-edge in graphical fidelity.

We test on “High” with FXAA at 1080p

The i5 wins this time in everything except for minimum .01%, an anomaly that didn’t seem to change no matter how many runs we went through. That being said the Intel CPU takes the win here although the A10 7870K puts up a great fight.

TOMB RAIDER (2013)

The most recent iteration of Crystal Dynamic’s long-running series, Tomb Raider represents one of the best-looking titles on PC to date. Its varied landscapes and beautiful organic environments create a quite graphically demanding title.

We ran this game on “Ultimate” with TressFX and FXAA at 1080p. MSAA and is disabled.

Taking a look at these results we see that all of these CPUs can run this game well, with the exception of the Pentium getting some noticeable stutter, although it is rare to get in game and with some lower settings would run very well. Aside from that these results are so close the A10 7870K’s lead is barely noticeable although it never does drop below 60 which is very nice.