Looking over at the latest 6000 series APUs, it is easy to be underwhelmed due by the fact they are 'just a refresh'. The primary benefit to the A10-6800K is the high out the box speeds, combined with a modest GPU overclock and some capable high performance memory the A10-6800K can give excellent gaming performance using just stock cooling, ideal for low profile and small form factor setups, not to mention that you will vastly improved performance per watt by not pumping the CPU with unnecessary voltage for minor gains.



Despite the claimed 'better' thermal monitoring, upon testing, this may not be of a benefit to overclockers. While internally it may be benefiting the APU by way of better power management and clock speeds, directly to the user, the thermal monitoring is just as useless as any other AMD chip from the past 5-10 years. Running various monitoring applications, including AMD's own Overdrive software, we were greeted with the typical temperature range of -252°C to 90°C and anywhere in between. The GPU side of monitoring seemed to be around a stable 59°C though I would not like to be the one to report it on the side of 'accurate'. This was disappointing as one may have expected thermal monitoring 'improvements' to be passed on to the end user directly.

The A10-6800K is ultimately a more expensive, better clocked, A10-5800K that has benefited from a maturing 32nm fabrication, that being said nothing has got 'worse' and considering that 'Richland' is a 'refresh' acting as a stop gap between 'Trinity' and the delayed 'Kaveri', it is understandable that some may be disappointed.

Offering good, balanced performance between CPU and GPU the A10-6800K is AMDs highest performing APU to date, perfect in the right situation. So we proudly present the AMD A10-6800K with our Vortez Silver.





Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net. Thanks to AMD for providing today’s review sample.