AMD Introduces the A10-7890K and Friends

Better clocks, better cooling, and better prices…

Mar 1, 2016 by

AMD SKUs FebToday AMD is introducing two new desktop processor SKUs the A10-7890K and the Athlon X4 880K. The A10-7890K is the fastest APU that AMD’s ever released with 1.02 Teraflops of compute on tap. It offers an extra 200Mhz of both base and turbo clock speed over the next model down the A10-7870K which is getting a price drop today. The final SKU that AMD’s bringing to market is the Athlon X4 880K which offers a base clock of 4 Ghz and a turbo clock of 4.2 Ghz.

All of these SKUs are based on the Godavari, a very mild refresh of Kaveri, and offer 4 MB L2 caches, 95 Watt TDPs, unlocked clock multipliers, and AMD’s improved coolers. Only the top SKU, the A10-7890K, is going to be bundled with the Wraith cooler we reviewed a few weeks ago. The other two models will come with a less premium 125 Watt cooler with no LEDs but similar acoustic performance. Pricing is straight forward with the 7890K @ $165, the 7870K @ $140, and the 880K @ $95.

AMD SKUs Feb Perf

AMD sent us a copy of the A10-7860K that they first told us about last month and we’ll be reviewing that chip later this week along with one of Gigabyte’s recently released FM2+ motherboards. Even with these new SKUs the value proposition of AMD’s FM2+ platform has changed very little since it was introduced with the launch of Kaveri a couple of years ago.

AMD is pitching these new chips as a perfect match for games like DOTA 2, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and League of Legends. They’re not wrong in that assertion. In fact, I’ve built three FM2+ PCs for people who primarily play Counter Strike: GO and League of Legends. The issue here of course is that while these SKUs are a solid iteration on AMD’s prior desktop lineup there’s little here that’s going to make people that have already bought into an FM2+ based system upgrade.

AMD SKUs Feb Updates

On the other hand, any of these SKUs combined with a new FM2+ motherboard would make a great entry-level gaming or office PC. I recently built a router using an old A10-7700K. If you’re planning on using discrete graphics grab the Athlon X4 880K and if you’re not ready go quite that far yet you can play pretty much any popular multiplayer game with an A10 prefixed SKU. When it comes the $100 to $150 price range AMD is giving its customers a lot of choices and no bad options.S|A

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Thomas Ryan

Author at SemiAccurate
Thomas Ryan is a freelance technology writer and photographer from Seattle, living in Austin. You can also find his work on SemiAccurate and PCWorld. He has a BA in Geography from the University of Washington with a minor in Urban Design and Planning and specializes in geospatial data science. If you have a hardware performance question or an interesting data set Thomas has you covered.