AMD A10-7860K
AMD’s most efficient processor yet.
This company has managed to make the most out of that 28nm architecture. We’ve seen power consumption and thermal TDP fall without the need for a smaller skin. Yet efficiency isn’t everything — performance is still king, and although the continued refinement is impressive, it’s that transistor size that is ultimately holding AMD back.
The AMD A10-7860K is a shining example of what you can piece together on a budget. It’s not a processing powerhouse, but it’s not meant to be. It’s precisely aimed at the foreheads of everyday general computing and entry-level gamers. Yet, it’s still an interesting and useful bit of hardware.
If you’re looking for a quick and easy budget build for a friend, someone who enjoys MOBAs or simple games (in terms of graphical fidelity), such as League or CS:GO, this should be your first port of call. It’s quite easy to assemble a machine with this at its heart for around $500, including a tiny SSD, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB HDD and a snazzy case. And for those titles, that’s all you really need. This is aimed at the budget builders.
As far as performance goes, the A10-7860K is a bit of a beauty, certainly for $158. Integrated GPU performance came out on top in comparison to all of Intel’s offerings, at a whopping 1,211 points in Firestrike, almost 120 points more than Intel’s HD520 graphical packages from the likes of the Core i7-6700K, and 300 points more than the entry level Core i3-6100. However, when it came to utilising a dedicated GPU, the 7860K struggled, losing out by 2,000 points in Firestrike versus the i3-6100 — a little disappointing, but not exactly too far from what we expected.
The real bottom smacker was power draw. Our test bench is nothing short of monstrous: 32GB of DDR3 at 1,866MHz, a GeForce GTX 980, two SSDs (500GB and 2TB), all running off a BeQuiet! Dark Power Pro Platinum 1,200W PSU. Yet even here, we only managed to pull 50W from the wall at idle; that’s 12W lower than every Intel CPU we’ve tested so far. At load, it did even out a little, with the 28nm core pulling 300W total, matching it up with an Intel Core i5-6600K, but still impressive, certainly when you consider that DDR3 runs at 1.5V, as opposed to DDR4’s 1.2V, and trust us on this one — that voltage change makes a difference.
Processing power, on the other hand, well, it’s where you’d expect it to be. In our testing, it’s about as good as one of the old-school Ivy Bridge i3s from yesteryear. Scoring 280 points in Cinebench R15, and taking a whopping nine minutes to fully archive our 5GB test folder, it’s a bit of a bummer, but that’s not what this core is for.
It’s a low-powered integrated gaming processor, capable of playing entry-level titles fairly comfortably at 720/1080p. Hell, it would even work well as a mini home theatre PC for those looking at that route.
And it gives us hope. Hope that AMD can take the lessons it’s learnt in optimising processor design, and apply them to the zany 14nm architecture currently in development. Hope that, finally, it can give Intel a run for its money, and bring a little balance back to the Force.