A step up from the A8-3850, the AMD A8-3870K APU has a slightly higher clock speed, at 3 GHz compared with 2.9 GHz for the lower-end model. The rest of the tech specs are identical, however, with four cores, no Turbo mode and no alternative to Intel's Hyper-Threading.
This slight boost in clock speed does improve performances slightly—by about 3% on average. This processor therefore comes in about equivalent to the now 'old' Core i3 560, and well below the Core i3 2100. The AMD A8-3870K and Intel's Core i3 2100 sell for similar prices, but graphics performances aren't quite as good in the Intel processor since AMD's APU has a graphics chip built-in. Note, however, that the integrated graphics chip doesn't mean that gamers can do away with a dedicated graphics card (not according to our tests, anyway).
This slight boost in clock speed does improve performances slightly—by about 3% on average. This processor therefore comes in about equivalent to the now 'old' Core i3 560, and well below the Core i3 2100. The AMD A8-3870K and Intel's Core i3 2100 sell for similar prices, but graphics performances aren't quite as good in the Intel processor since AMD's APU has a graphics chip built-in. Note, however, that the integrated graphics chip doesn't mean that gamers can do away with a dedicated graphics card (not according to our tests, anyway).
Click on the graph to see all our test results
and compare this processor with others
| Power Use | Performance: Applications | Performance: Games |
 |
 |
|
| View Performance Index Table |
Pros
- Absolute performance of integrated graphics chip
Cons
- Power use
- Processor could be faster
Conclusion
AMD has made a great step forward with its APUs thanks to a much improved graphics processing unit. However, gamers would still need to use a separate graphics card alongside this APU. Plus, pure processing performances lag behind the competition.
OUR SCORE
DigitalVersus on...