Introduction

I really struggle to get excited about AMD CPUs these days. It's not that they're bad or anything like that, but it just feels like there's no excitement coming from AMD's end and that transfers over to us. I found myself excited when we saw Llano come out last year, but after the initial launch of the new APU from AMD, we really didn't hear much else, and that was disappointing.

Not long after that we got word that the next-generation APU was coming in the form of Trinity. Alongside Trinity we also got word of the next generation Bulldozer chips coming in the form of Piledriver or Vishera. Bulldozer was a horrible launch that we feel AMD handled extremely poorly. Along with our original review on the FX-8150 I also did an editorial about how I felt the launch was handled in the form of Shi**y Marketing Killed the Bulldozer Star.

Jump forward to today and we're looking at replacements for both platforms in the form of the A10-5800K and FX-8350. Before even testing you already have this feeling of how the whole process is going to play out. You're going to end up with both an APU and CPU that hit at a really strong price point against the competition. From a technical standpoint they're going to look really strong, but because of traditional benchmark numbers, the platform isn't going to look as attractive against the competition (Intel). When you look at gaming numbers, though, you'll see that the platform manages to perform well as games focus more on the video card than the CPU itself. In the end you're ultimately going to end up with what is a good product that won't penetrate the market as well as it should. It'll be due to both a combination of a certain "stigma"� that sits around AMD, along with the fact that it just won't be promoted in the right way.

The whole process feels so pessimistic, especially since I really have a large amount of respect for so many people at AMD. When it comes to the CPU side of things, though, it feels like AMD are fighting a constant uphill battle that has no end in sight.

Still, saying all of that, let's just quickly go over how we'll be looking at our processors today. We'll start off by taking a look at both the A10-5800K and FX-8350 chips. Once we've done that we'll quickly look at the two motherboards we're using today. For the A10 it's the GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4 while the FX is sitting on the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD3.

Once we've done that we'll then quickly cover what's in our testbed today along with the other setups that we'll be using before we get stuck into the benchmarking side of things. The first thing we need to do, though, is see just what's going on with the A10-5800K.