My Thoughts and Conclusion

After getting to play with the AMD Test Drive for almost a month I would say overall I am impressed with the system. It being free and always have been a fan of AMD makes it better but being objective it is a nice system. With everything I think an aftermarket cooler is needed to have the APU run at full strength since my ASRock board has a profile built into it to overclock to 4.8 Ghz without doing anything. I haven’t tested this to the highest overclock and probably won’t since I plan on having this as my new shiny HTPC. Now I am also the kind of person when I get a peice of hardware I take it for what it is. I didn’t expect the AMD A10-6800K to outperform my Intel i7 but it ran games very nicely for what it was. I know alot of people want to throw in a good discrete GPU to run in tandem but then what is the point of even having the APU I think. I wouldn’t mind later on getting a 6670 or 7750 to do a hybrid crossfire with. I did try to use my Sapphire 7750 Ultimate GPU but the APU wouldn’t have anything to do with it and since its unofficially supported I can’t blemish my thoughts of the A10-6800K. If it had worked it would have only been a plus. Having said all of that overall I really did like the AMD Test Drive system.

Like I said earlier I like to score a system in this case or an individual piece of hardware based on what it was meant to do and not against what other products do.

Overall Score: 9.0/10

Pros:

• Great hardware overall
• Can use as daily PC or use as Server/HTPC
• Very overclockable with aftermarket cooler

Cons:

• None

AMD Test system was provided by AMD through the AMD Test Drive Program, which sponsors myself.