AMD Richland A10-6800K and A10-6700 APU Review

AMD Richland APU Review

Introduction

With the release of the Llano chips in mid-2011 and the Trinity chips in late-2012, the AMD APUs were shown to be the perfect option for the person who wanted a cheap, yet capable system that could be expanded on in the future. They not only offered plenty of CPU power to handle anything a regular user would need, but also enough GPU power on-chip to tackle some gaming. You can pick up one of these chips for a little over $100, pair it with an equally affordable motherboard and RAM, and you have a nice little setup for very little money. You can then expand on it with a dedicated graphics card, more or faster RAM, and even get into some pretty serious overclocking, the sum of which will leave you with a truly powerful machine capable of handling any modern game out there today.

AMD has continued this legacy with its newest line of APUs, Richland. These new chips feature the same proven Piledriver architecture for the CPU side, but an upgrade the the Radeon 8xxx series on the GPU side. On top of that the flagship chip supports faster RAM speeds (2133 MHz up from 1866) and all chips have had frequency bumps and improvements for the Turbo Core feature. Naturally with Richland and Trinity sharing the same architecture, the same FM2 socket it used as well as the A85X chipset. We will be taking a look at the top of the line, unlocked A10-6800k and its locked and downclocked version, the A10-6700. Read on to see the lineup and how they perform.