AMD’s A10-7870K APU: A Review

Splitting the gap between the 7860K and the 7890K…

7870K Photos (1 of 6)

Today we’re taking a look at AMD’s A10-7870K APU which retails for about $140. The 7870K as its name implies sits between the mid-range A10-7860K and the top-of-the-line A10-7890K. Compared to the A10-7860K the A10-7870K has a 30 Watt higher TDP, a higher base clock speed, and a higher GPU clock speed. The A10-7870K also comes paired with AMD’s 125 Watt Silent Cooler which is a great little cooling solution.

7870K Photos (2 of 6)

AMD’s chips have had rather attractive looking packing as of late and the A10-7870K is no exception to this trend. Given that the Godavari chip the A10-7870K is based on is a pretty well-known quantity at this point there won’t be any surprises in this review. The A10-7870K slots in right between the ~$110 7860K and the ~$165 A10-7890K. Considering that there’s only a ~10% performance gap between these two chips it is difficult to see how an SKU like the 7870K makes sense outside of filling out AMD’s pricing stack.

7870K Photos (3 of 6)

Too Long; Didn’t Read

If you’re a subscriber you can now find our testing methodology, exact hardware configurations, a detailed justification of these benchmarks, and our raw testing data at the very end of the article. We’ve opted to place that information behind our paywall with the acknowledgment that few people actually read those parts of our reviews and with the goal of making these articles easier to read for people who aren’t interested in those aspects of our content.

7870K Photos (4 of 6)

Transparency Statement

For the sake of transparency, we want you to know that AMD provided both of the APUs, the CPU, and the DDR3 memory we’ll be testing in this review. All the other components were purchased at retail and without the knowledge or consent of those companies. We took no outside input for this article.

7870K Photos (5 of 6)

Test Results

Again the A10-7870K’s goal here is to beat out the A10-7860K we’ll be comparing it to and justify it’s $30 higher price point.

7870K review

Wow, would you look at that? The A10-7870K near perfectly splits the gap between the A10-7860K and the A10-7890K. We see a couple of odd regressions in our benchmarks like Handbrake, WinRAR, and wPrime but excluding those outliers, we can see a pretty consistent narrative.

 

7870K power consumption

Looking at power consumption the difference in TDPs between these two chips becomes very clear.

7870K Photos (6 of 6)

Conclusion

In the end, you’d be buying the A10-7870K if want a socket FM2+ chip, think that the A10-7890K isn’t worth the price, and really like AMD’s near-silent 125 Watt cooler. But there are also plenty of reasons to hold off on purchasing a new APU right now. The biggest of which is the launch of the new Bristol Ridge APU back in May. SKUs based on this chip will be coming to the desktop as part of AMD’s upcoming AM4 platform. Back in January when AMD announced the AM4 platform it said that it would come to market in the second half of this year.

So if you need to build a system now, the A10-7870K could make sense for you. But as we’re on the cusp of the transition to a new socket and newer APUs I would wager that it would make more sense to hold off for now.

Note: The following is for professional and student level subscribers.

Disclosures: Charlie Demerjian, Thomas Ryan and Stone Arch Networking Services, Inc. have no consulting relationships, investment relationships, or hold any investment positions with any of the companies mentioned in this report.

The following two tabs change content below.
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.