The Kaveri Refresh 'Godavari' Review: Testing AMD's A10-7870K
by Ian Cutress on June 1, 2015 11:59 AM ESTOffice Performance
The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can cause concern during environments with a variable threaded workload. There is also an added issue of the motherboard remaining consistent, depending on how the motherboard manufacturer wants to add in their own boosting technologies over the ones that Intel would prefer they used. In order to remain consistent, we implement an OS-level unique high performance mode on all the CPUs we test which should override any motherboard manufacturer performance mode.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.
WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
3D Particle Movement
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and results are given in seconds.
Web Benchmarks
On the lower end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of web browsing. For our web benchmarks, we take four well known tests with Chrome 35 as a consistent browser.
Sunspider 1.0.2
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
WebXPRT
Google Octane v2
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
140 Comments
View All Comments
MrSpadge - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
There are reports that this chip throttles back to 1600 MHz quickly after being loaded, only to jump up to a turbo mode for a short time and back to throttling again. This might due to unfinished pre-release bioses, but AMD certainly changed the performance tuning. And applies a mad voltage to this chip.silverblue - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Apparently, it was an early BIOS that caused the throttling, and as such has now been fixed.Valantar - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
From what's being said in the forums, stock voltages for these chips are ludicrously high - in the 1.4-1.5V range! - causing all kinds of throttling and other odd behavior. From what's being said there, most Kaveri chips run just fine at stock speeds at~1.2V, so this overvolting is causing some real havoc in the test results. I would love to see AT look into this, at least for a bit, as it could cause some serious differences in both speed add power usage.tabascosauz - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
The 7850K auto-throttles to 3.0GHz CPU-side whenever iGPU is pulling a lot of watts. It's a known issue that basically can't be fixed, probably because AMD is too paranoid about more ASRock A88X-ITXs blowing up under load. I wouldn't be surprised if the 7870K doesn't suffer from the same thing. The CPU speed boosts are always nonsense with Kaveri; the APU runs into its thermal envelope faster than you can say "throttling".Maybe AMD should start setting spec for VRM design. VRM design is the one killing AM3+, since MSI clearly doesn't know how to make them properly on that platform. FM2+, being the modern platform, shouldn't even have to address these problems (AMD should have made the necessary precautions), but it must if AMD wants to make any money.
Hobbitter - Friday, June 5, 2015 - link
I recieved a Asus crossblade ranger fm2+ and i had to send it back because of the VRM, they burnt my finger as soon as i touched them they were that hot. Plus it kept shutting my computer down even with a desk fan it would be red hot. could be a common problem with these APU's.Gigaplex - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I don't see how the conclusions match the test results. In many (arguably the majority) the new chip was bested by at least one other older AMD chip yet the conclusions of each segment pretty much state that the new chip is the clear winner. What?lefty2 - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
You are correct. He says "almost all of our graphics tests saw a gain over the previous head of the Kaveri list".This is plainly not true. The test results show that Alien Isolation, Total War Attila and GRID autosport it's slower than 7850K. That's 3 out 5 games where it's slower! and it seems that most of the CPU tests it's slower than older Kavari CPUs.
jeffrey - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
"I don't see how the conclusions match the test results. In many (arguably the majority) the new chip was bested by at least one other older AMD chip yet the conclusions of each segment pretty much state that the new chip is the clear winner. What?"Agree 100% !! All I could think of while reading the review was how bad AMD's scaling looked and how the 7870K was dominated by the 7850K. I figured I was going to get to a page somewhere in the review explaining why it trailed the outgoing chip so often and then bam, dat conclusion tho..
FriendlyUser - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Thanks for the review guys, much appreciated as I am considering one for my brother.nikaldro - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
You're better of with a pentium + GTX750 in most cases