AMD latest release of the Richland A8-6600K is one of the coolest APU available in the market which is developed by AMD providing a highly powerful quad-core processor (4.2 GHz) and Ati Radeon HD 8570D both embedded in a single chip. Ya that’s what we call an APU, both CPU and graphics card comes in a single chip enabling your machine to harvest the processing and graphics power right from the processing space. It has an on-board HD 8570D IGP (integrated graphics processor) with 855 MHz core speed and 256 stream processors for rendering out of the box visuals on your gaming monitor or HDTV.
An example of what you could achieve with this APU in your gaming machine:
- Game: Dirt Showdown playable in high quality
- Game: Sleeping Dogs playable in medium quality
- Game: Metro Last Light playable in low quality
Note: Above three games ran @ 720p and 30 FPS.
This clearly shows that Accelerated processing units are getting powrful and enabling gamers to play high end games in playable high definition gameplays. A8-6600K provides a visually realistic gameplay with crisp textures, dust and smoke in stunning clarity, which will amuse any gamer who want a powerful graphics performance without installing a dedicated graphics card.
Overall APU Performance in Comparison to Dedicated Graphics Cards
Since this is a new technology and entering the gaming market but the future outcomes are promising for beginner to mid range gamers who seek ways to build gaming computers in low cost. Right now the APU are good enough to play high performance games but it varies from game to game. Several benchmark tests reveal that APU are great as long as you want to play on 720p resolution and seek a 30 frame second gameplay. AMD is working on improving the APU technology, so this is a work-in-progress, as the time passes the technology will be refined and that will result in delivering more powerful chips that will someday compete with the leading dedicated video cards available in the market today.
CrossFire Mode is ON for A8-6600K
Another bonus that comes with this revolutionary Accelerated processing Unit is its ability to work in Crossfire mode with either HD 6670 or HD 7750 AMD cards. For PC users who require higher performance and would like to install a dedicated video adapter that could work in hybrid dual GPU environment, A8-6600K is the way to go, since it allows to communicate with HD6670 and HD7750 graphics cards and let’s you achieve the goal once considered impossible (save money! without sacrificing the performance).