AMD A10-5800K review

The A10-5800K is the first of AMD’s new “Trinity” desktop processor range. Trinity chips have built-in graphics and are a replacement for last year’s “Llano” processors, which were the first desktop processors with integrated graphics powerful enough to run modern games.

AMD’s processors are more GPU than CPU now

The Llano chips may have had powerful graphics, but their performance in desktop applications from their K10 cores was adequate rather than impressive. The Trinity processors have similar core architecture to AMD’s Bulldozer processors, which is much more up-to-date. Inside the top-of-the-range A10-5800K are two x86 modules, each of which contains two “Piledriver” cores, for four cores in total. Each core runs at 3.8GHz and can boost up to 4.2GHz when there’s enough thermal headroom, and each module has its own 2MB block of Level 2 cache. Unfortunately, Trinity isn’t an easy upgrade over Llano, as it needs a new socket type – FM2 – and therefore a new motherboard.

The new architecture led to some improvements in our 2D application benchmarks. A score of 74 overall, with 74 in the intensive multi-threaded multi-tasking test and 80 in the lightly-threaded image processing benchmark, shows the A10-5800K to be significantly quicker than last year’s range-topping A8-3850, with its overall score of 65. The nearest Intel Ivy Bridge processor we’ve tested is the Core i5-3450, which gets an overall score of 87 but is £40 more expensive than the A10-5800K. This means that AMD’s chip is 85% as quick as Intel’s but is only around 70% of the price. It’s plenty quick enough for a mid-range PC and the price is right, too.

The new “Piledriver” cores give reasonable desktop performance