A10-7850K Build Review

Summary

I received my components from Newegg on Monday and spent a few hours putting it all together.  I basically gutted my current build, removing the motherboard and CPU, RAM and graphics card and replaced them with my new components.

1 ASRock FM2A88X Extreme6+

2 SAPPHIRE R9 270X 2GB Toxic

1 AMD A10-7850K Kaveri

G.SKILL Sniper Gaming Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000)

Trouble

Believe it or not it worked as easily as I had hoped (or so it seemed).  I slapped it all together, turned her on and she booted up!  I immediately applied the BIOS patch to bring the UEFI BIOS up to version 2.40 which is designed to make optimal use of Kaveri.  Rebooted and viola!  Windows installed a few additional components (AMD / ATI drivers for the graphics cards) and I was up and running.

Soon thereafter I noticed that my RAM was running at 1600 speeds!  I booted into BIOS and selected one of the available XMP pre-configurations for this RAM and restarted.  Nothing.  ERROR 50.  (That's a RAM error from the motherboard).  I double checked the Asrock website and this RAM is supported.  I tried a gain.  ERROR 50... reseated the RAM, same thing.  I tried MANUALLY entering the timings, same thing.

I spent a lot of time trying to reconfigure the RAM and having to continually resetting the CMOS by using a pit that was wedged between the two graphics cards.  NOTE to Asrock, move the pin!  Every time I had to remove one graphics card, then replace it.

Finally I simply gave up.  I pulled the 1866 RAM from my old build and used that.  Booted, and that RAM came up running exactly as it should.  So I entered an RMA for the new RAM, which Newegg immediately accepted.  I've never had a problem with G.Skill before so this was a surprise.  Also, I requested a refund instead of a replacement.  I will do some more research first.  But I should note that the XMP timings and the timings listed on the packaging did not match what CPU-Z was telling me that the RAM was capable of.  So I am not sure what was going on there.

Gaming

My comments on performance will be somewhat anecdotal since all kinds of data is already available out there.  My old system was an FX-8350 build on ASUS motherboard.  (By the way, I do prefer Asus over Asrock and to some degree regret not going with another Asus motherboard).

First I ran Skyrim.  I could really tell no difference between running it on my old build (which was a FX-8350 build) and this one.  I did, however, encounter a crash after playing for a mere 5 or 10 minutes.  My game is loaded with high resolution textures and these new cards have only 2 GB of VRAM as opposed to my old beast that had 4 GB.  I think that really makes a difference and I might have to back out some of the textures.  OR it could be that the CrossfireX cards caused the issue.  I don't really know.  I will try some more tonight and maybe back out some of the textures to see what happens.

Next I ran Civilization V.  Again, no problems, ran fine for quite awhile.  And again, I could not see any difference in the gaming experience.

I will try Torchlight 2 tonight.

I do want to note that these Toxic R9 270X cards are QUIET.  I have to admit, having owned AMD graphics cards in the past, that I was surprised!  They've done an amazing job.

Everyday Use

This will take some time to assess, but I can tell you right now that the APU is generally slower.  Applications start a little bit more slowly, web pages load just a bit slower.  Nothing is painfully slow, mind you... and I expect things to get better as drivers, bios, application and windows updates come along that make better use of the new architecture.

I have noticed that with my H60 the APU has not yet climbed above 42 C.  I ran folding at home all night and that was what it peaked out at.  So far this build is silent and gaming capable.  I would like to do some more tests that I have done in the past (software builds and such) but I am unable to at the moment due to networking issues (nothing to do with the new build).  Below are some images regarding the new build:

Update On Performance

Performance is not as bad as I expected.  I did several startup runs of our work website (development mode) and it starts in about 13.8 seconds.  That is VERY similar to the FX-8350 I was running (maybe off by .5 to .9 second), and about 2 to 2.5 seconds slower than an older model quad core i7.  There is some minor variance depending on network traffic and background applications.

Compilation seems to be slower but not by much.  Similar to the previous test, compilation was only off by a few seconds.  1:16 for the A10 versus 1:12 for the FX.  My i7 2600K used to finish in just under 1 minute.

More gaming updates... Skyrim suffered frequent crashes.  After turning off some special effects mods for lighting I was able to play through 2 levels.  It does seem to suffer from jitters a little more than my previous build but I am inclined to believe that has more to do with the fact I am running in crossfire.  I also have not figured out how to properly limit FPS with the catalyst control center (I thought I figured it out but using it caused even more crashes in Skyrim) so I need to use MSI Afterburner.  Torchlight II played just fine... no noticeable difference from my previous build.

I just downloaded my free copy of Battlefield 4.  Time to take it for a spin.  It doesn't play at all... all sorts of bad things happen.  Not sure why just yet.

Civilization V has caused me some headaches.  My CPU is running on average between 10 C. and 12 C. for temperatures.  Under somewhat heavy load it might pop up to around 27 C.  The H60 seems to be doing its job.  But when I play a large (LARGE or bigger) map with more civilizations and city states, I've walked away from the game somewhere around the 1800's and come back to a frozen computer... which, when restarted (and this is after full power down and restart) yields a CPU temp of 47 C.  Now why that is surprising is because a DIFFERENT program used to record temps indicates on average that my CPU is running around 38 C.  That makes more sense to me.  Now add 35 to that... you end up with a whopping 72 C!!  So, no wonder it is seizing up.

-------------------

After updating from BIOS version 2.40 to 2.70 it might be my imagination (as I have not done any more tests since I just did the update tonight, 1/24) but I swear the entire system is snappier and smoother in general.  Odd.