AMD A10 7850K + Dual Graphics Review

👤by Tony Le Bourne Comments 📅31-05-14
Dual Graphics & the Memory Advantage

An AMD R7 250 discrete graphics card

If you desire extra horses in your games you can purchase a Radeon R7 series graphics card to pair with the APU as an affordable upgrade. It is well documented that this may not be the best performance to price option for outright capital, however, it does provide a reasonable upgrade path for those who choose to go with the A10 7850K later down the line. The DDR3 R7250 can be had for as little as £57 inc VAT but should still provide reasonable graphics increase, though if you want that little extra you may want to go for the DDR5 version or the R7 260X.



R9 Gamer Series Memory

For absolute performance from the APU, the powerful graphics compute cores are heavily dependent on memory bandwidth for good scaling. The Radeon R9 Gamer series is clocked at 2400MHz with a little room for overclocking and with 16GB, you will have no problem with offsetting 2GB+ for graphics use.



Dual graphics results


We see fair improvement for the most of our games except for DOTA2 which doesn't support dual graphics, alone, the R7 250 fails to best the APU. In BF4, the mantle API doesn't support dual graphics with the R7 250, so make sure you leave it set to DX11 if you go for this combination of hardware.

Accelerated Performance: What it means.
Since the advent of the APU, the introduction of HSA features and hUMA means that the APU is now distinct and separate from previous CPU and GPU designs. the GPGPU compute cores are now able to be utilised for general tasks that would otherwise be dealt with inefficiently by the CPU. This would mean that the term Accelerated Processing Unit isn't just a buzzword anymore and this is why AMD are list the A10 7850K as having 12 compute cores. Even if you add a standalone discrete unit, the APU will benefit by tapping into those 8 extra GPGPU cores. This is to provide the best user experience possible in modern PC systems. A simple yet effective example of how this can help people in their computing needs would be with the simple demonstration of the AMD JPEG Decoder.


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What this test does is time how long it takes to decode a number of high resolution images using the integrated windows codec vs the AMD one that utilises the compute cores on the APU, saving time increases user experience. The below results are with our OC setting.


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A Counter to this demonstration however would be to remember the fact that the base comparative is representative of the CPU performance. Another interesting representation of overall system performance could be the use of the ASUS ROG Realbench application. Version 2.2 now utilises OpenCL within a selection of real world tasks from GIMP, Handbrake and Luxmark to measure performance.



To put it into perspective, high end overclocked Intel processors with GTX 780/ R9 290 can score over 90000pts, while my own main rig, with a A8 3870K and a Radeon HD 6850 scores 29120.


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