The most impressive thing about the A8-7650K is that for its relatively low price, it offers a known level of performance comparable to previous generation flagship APUs, with the added benefit of the accelerated performance that Kaveri has to offer. While our high resolution gaming benchmarks are done as to push the GPU to its limit, it does and can game well in a casual or 'lite' scenarios, reducing some eye candy and the resolution a little. As discussed in the A10-7850K review, the most significant gains from the Kaveri architecture are actually the things people often take for granted. Utilising all 10 compute cores to accelerate day to day productivity and media creation, you will find the user experience quicker and snappier, making this an ideal candidate for that well balanced mainstream system. This is highlighted by AMDs JPEG decoder benchmark, showing the APUs ability to throw around large packets of data via the compute cores.



The APU isn't limited to accelerating just the rendering of large JPEG images, you will find that the APU accelerates image editing in the likes of Photoshop, video editing in Sony Vegas and calculations in Libre Office. This list isn't exhaustive but it does represent the increasing number of applications that are taking advantage of this technology. The only real downside with this APU is that it comes with a lower stock frequency compared to the rest of the APU family, reducing the already weakest aspect of the APU itself, the pure CPU processing grunt. It could be argued that sheer CPU grunt is becoming irrelevant, residing in marginalised and specific performance tasks. In this event, the APU is not for you. For everything else, the A8-7650K allows a low priced, great performing all rounder that will only let you down if you expect it to be that 'low power gaming chip' of your dreams.



Considering that you can squeeze extra GPU and CPU performance out of the A8-7650K due to it being unlocked, you can appreciate the sense of value it represents; particularly when paired with a low cost motherboard like the A68 chipset. You will struggle to find this level of 'balanced' performance from the competition. This is why the APU really does push the boundaries of what 'mainstream' computing means in regards to performance expectations. This is why the AMD A8-7650K gets our Amazing Value award.

Affordable and capable of handling your everyday workload and media needs in a seamless user experience. If you want to push the performance a little bit more you can easily overclock it too.





Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.