AMD A10-6790K review

We’ve always found AMD’s A-series processors to be great value, providing good amount of processing power with highly impressive built-in graphics processors. For this reason we were keen to review the AMD A10-6790K, an A-series processor with the same Radeon HD 8670D built-in graphics processor as the Best Buy-winning AMD A10-6800K, but with ever so slightly reduced clock speeds.

The A10-6800K has a base clock speed of 4.1GHz, while the A10-6790K has a base clock speed of 4GHz. The A10-6800K also has a higher boost clock speed of 4.4GHz, while the A10-6790K has a boost clock speed of 4.3GHz. In practise, this slight variation in base and boost clock speeds made very little difference in our benchmark tests, with the A10-6800K scoring 70 overall and the A10-6790K scoring 67 overall when tested with an Asus A88X-Pro motherboard.

However, the K in the A10-6790K’s name means you can overclock it, which means even though it comes with sub-A106800K clock speeds by default, you don’t have to stick with them. Indeed, depending on your motherboard you can soon have it running at 4.4GHz with just a little configuration.

When clocked to 4.4GHz, the A10-6790K scored 73 overall in our benchmark results. The largest increase in performance was seen in the multitasking segment of the benchmark test, where the A10-6790K scored 70, which is an increase of six points from the 64 it scored at stock speeds.

When we increased the clock speed further to 4.8GHz, the A10-6790K scored 76 overall, which is an impressive jump in speed when you consider that we tested the processor on an open test bench with a stock cooler.

Eager to test the graphical performance of the A10-6790K, we ran our Dirt Showdown benchmark at a resolution of 1,280×720 with 4x anti-aliasing and graphics quality set to High. The processor’s built-in graphics processor produced an average frame rate of 40.5fps, which is mightily impressive, and means you won’t need to use a separate graphics card to play basic 3D games or watch Full HD videos.

The A10-6790K is currently around £10 cheaper than the A10-6800K and given its good performance at stock clock speeds, its overclocking potential and its graphics performance, we think the A10-6790K is a great buy.