AMD Kaveri A10-7850K (With Radeon R7 Spectre GPU) Quick Test

This short test/review can be seen as an update of the A10-6800K test. The testbed is the same (ASRock FM2 A88M Extreme4+, 8 GB of DDR3-2400 Patriot Viper), I only swapped the A10-6800K for the brand new A10-7850K APU launched two weeks ago.

Some pictures of the A10-7850K box:

A10-7850K unboxing:

OK let’s look at the interesting things, the software side. To enjoy the A10-7850K, I updated the motherboard BIOS (very easy thanks to a live update option in the BIOS settings) and I installed the latest Catalyst 13.30-140108a (beta version) with support of new Kaveri APUs. The BIOS update has improved the stability of the ASRock FM2A88M based tested with the Patriot Viper 8GB DDR3-2400 memory kit. The Corsair Airflow module is no longer required. Great!

The tested: ASRock FM2A88M + Patriot Viper 8GB DDR3-2400 + CoolerMaster Seidon 120v

Here are some screenshots of an updated version of GPU Caps Viewer:

The OpenCL panel shows the GPU codename of the A10-7850K GPU: Spectre.

And here are some screenshots of the latest version of GPU-Z:

Now some performance tests. The first test is the OpenGL 4.3 compute shaders demo available in the code sample pack of GLSL Hacker. To compare apples with apples, I set the DDR3 speed clock to 1600MHz because this compute shader demo has been tested with the A10-6800K + DDR3 1600:

Under the same conditions (DDR3 1600), the A10-6800K ran the demo at around 164 FPS while our new A10-7850K shows a nice 550 FPS!

DDR3 2400:

GpuTest – FurMark test (OpenGL 3.2)

	1024×640 windowed	1920×1080 fullscreen
A10-6800K Radeon HD 8670D + DDR3 2400	1123 points, 20FPS	695 points, 11FPS
A10-7850K Radeon R7 + DDR3 2400	1103 points, 18FPS (-2%)	646 points, 10FPS (-7%)

GpuTest – TessMark X16 test (OpenGL 4.0)

	1024×640 windowed	1920×1080 fullscreen
Radeon HD 8670D + DDR3 2400	14398 points, 240FPS	9736 points, 162PS
A10-7850K Radeon R7 + DDR3 2400	18905 points, 315FPS (+31%)	10821 points, 180FPS (+11%)

GpuTest – Volplosion (OpenGL 3.2)

	1024×640 windowed	1920×1080 fullscreen
Radeon HD 8670D + DDR3 2400	1306 points, 21FPS	424 points, 7FPS
A10-7850K Radeon R7 + DDR3 2400	1426 points, 23FPS (+9%)	461 points, 7FPS (+8%)

3DMark (2013)

	Ice Storm	Cloud Gate	Fire Strike
Radeon HD 8670D + DDR3 2400	73517	6574	1173
A10-7850K Radeon R7 + DDR3 2400	70423 (-5%)	6999 (+6%)	1522 (+30%)

In most of the tests, the A10-7850K is faster than the A10-6800K. But in some tests (3DMark Ice Storm or the FurMark module of GpuTest), the A10-7850K is slower. Maybe we can attribute this weakness to the Catalyst driver that is in beta version and is the first driver to support the A10-7850K. Wait and see if next versions of Catalyst drivers will improve these scores.