AMD Athlon 860K Processor: specifications and reviews

A powerful, but inexpensive processor for a personal computer - this is far from a myth, as it may seem at first glance. The fact that the world-famous company AMD has put on the production of top-end crystals without an integrated graphics accelerator. Accordingly, high-performance processors have fallen in price almost in half.

The focus of this article is the AMD Athlon 860K gaming chip, which claims to be the best buy in the mid-range and budget segments on the computer market. Overview, specifications and reviews of owners will allow a potential buyer to become more familiar with the novelty.

Introduction to the processor

A large cardboard box in black, red inserts along its entire contour and a company logo show the owner that he has a processor from a well-known AMD manufacturer. Almost all users of this device in their reviews note a strange feature that they noticed when they met - a weak cooling system. In the box, along with the crystal, there is a small cooler from Foxconn, which causes mistrust in its appearance.

In addition to the basic devices, in the package, the user will find a lot of unnecessary literature describing the processor specification, as well as thermal paste, which the owner will need when installing all components in the system unit. As for the AMD Athlon 860K OEM, everything is much simpler here - a small plastic box, which is conveniently located processor and warranty card.

By the way, before you throw out the documentation, many owners recommend that you scroll through it. In one of the books there is a company logo of AMD, made in the form of a sticker on the computer case. Oddly enough, the manufacturer did not attach it to the processor or thermal paste.

Clash of the Titans

Naturally, potential buyers are interested in the purpose for which a well-known company has modified its high-performance products and started distributing them to virtually all users (the price on the domestic market is 6,000 rubles). As it turned out, everything is very simple. The whole problem lies in the core and socket, which is equipped with a crystal AMD Athlon x4 860K (Kaveri and Socket FM2 +).

Yes, the processor, created by the 28-nanometer process, is simply morally obsolete. Accordingly, the primary task of the manufacturer is the sale of stale chips. From here and modernization with the subsequent decrease in the cost of the product. However, in this whole benefit affects not only the company AMD, but also a potential buyer, who gets a fairly productive processor at a very attractive price.

Basic technical specifications

On one AMD Athlon x4 860K chip, 4 physical cores are implemented, each of which operates at a frequency of 3700 MHz. The processor at the hardware level supports Turbo Boost mode and is capable of overclocking up to 4 GHz. Acceleration is carried out automatically by changing the multiplier from 37 to 40. Accordingly, the base frequency of the system bus of the chip is 100 MHz.

It should be noted right away that there is only one thread for each core of the processor, and the crystal does not have a cache of the third level, which looks rather strange for such an attractive device. But the manufacturer provided its product with a large volume of cache level 2 (4 MB) and level 1 (64 KB for data and 129 KB for instructions).

About high technologies

The AMD Athlon x4 860K FM2 processor supports all modern instructions and technologies. In fact, this crystal can be installed not only in the gaming platform, but also implemented in servers, because the chip at the hardware level supports virtualization, environment variables, encryption and is protected from malicious code transmitted in the machine language.

The device can work with dual-channel memory mode and is fully compatible with DDR3-2133 MHz modules. This news will certainly please all fans of resource-intensive dynamic games, which have already discovered the dependence of many applications on the speed of RAM and the processor.

The weak link of the game processor

As you might expect, this interesting product has one significant problem related to the cooling system, which many AMD Athlon 860K processor owners pay attention to. Reviews negative character can be understood. The game crystal with a heat release of 95 watts is equipped with some kind of a children's fan and an aluminum radiator with a large cross section.

And the problem arises in the normal mode, and what will happen when overclocking, when the processor starts to dissipate 150-160 watts? There are not so many options for solving the problem. The potential buyer should initially be concerned about buying a decent cooling system. Naturally, when choosing a central processor in the computer market, experts recommend that users prefer OEM modifications instead of the boxed version. At least, from an economic point of view, this will be the right step.

Choosing a decent cooler

Immediately it becomes clear what the user will spend money on - the powerful AMD Athlon 860K processor needs decent cooling. And it's worth noting that a good cooler for a game crystal with a large dissipated power costs a lot of money. However, before buying, the owner must decide for himself whether he will overclock the processor or it will have enough base frequencies.

Of the inexpensive solutions among the air cooling for the processors , DeepCool Ice Pro products have proven themselves. An inexpensive solution (the price of about 2-3 thousand rubles) has a heat package of 125 watts and will not exactly allow a powerful crystal to overheat under high loads.

But fans of overclocking will have to double their budget, because a decent cooler that can cope with the dissipated power of 160 watts, in the budget segment is missing. Here the products from Noctua, Scuthe and DeepCool Gamer will come to the user's assistance, which have only positive feedback from customers.

Build a gaming PC

When building a gaming platform, many users are interested in what computer components should be selected for the AMD Athlon II 860K chip in order to get the best performance with minimal costs. And if everything is clear with the motherboard (compliance of the platform in the priority), then in the rest in such matters without the help of experts can not do.

According to enthusiasts, the gaming processor fully reveals the potential of Nvidia GTX 750 and AMD HD 7790 gaming graphics cards, forcing them to work at the limit of their capabilities. And this happens in the normal mode, without overclocking the crystal. Experts recommend to choose for the game processor video cards in class above (GTX 750 Ti or AMD HD 5870).

With RAM, things are simpler. For resource-intensive applications, it is recommended to use 8-12 gigabytes of memory, but fans of sports games (NBA, FIFA) should consider installing 16 GB in the system.

Correct overclocking

It is clear that without increasing the productivity of its own resources, the AMD Athlon 860K is of little interest to anyone. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss the game potential of the processor and its correct overclocking. Naturally, before the event, the buyer should take care of the availability of decent cooling, otherwise the chip can be dispersed only once (then it can be discarded).

Acceleration can be done in two ways: raise the bus frequency and use a multiplier. The second option is preferable, since it increases the performance of only the processor, and there will be no problems with the errors. If it is not possible to start the system, the BIOS of the motherboard will reset the multiplier to the factory settings.

But with the frequency of the bus often there are problems, and they often concern RAM. Fans of overclocking are better at first to worry about RAM modules supporting non-standard frequencies.

The closest competitors in the AMD lineup

If we study AMD processors in the price category up to 6,000 rubles, it will be found that not many chips can demonstrate high performance in gaming solutions. Attention enthusiasts attracted two crystals with the code name Vishera and created under the platform AM3 +. This is a legendary processor with six cores FX-6300 and the most powerful representative of 4-core platforms, AMD FX-4350.

Yes, if you compare the performance of the AMD Athlon 860K with the characteristics of the processors, then you can find a discrepancy. This is the memory of the third level cache. In FX processors, it is 8 megabytes, but this figure does not significantly affect the overall performance of the platform. As the results show, in almost all tests, all processors demonstrate the same performance, which raises doubts among potential customers. After all, logically, the 6-nuclear representative should be a priori faster.

Competitor analogues

Many users, overclocking to the limit AMD Athlon x4 860K Kaveri, try to prove to others that their processor can compete with a representative of the line Intel Core i5. That's only some of the overclocking potential of the competitor, for some reason, many are silent. Naturally, around the championship of such processors and there are many disputes that can destroy only comparative testing.

Let this sound strange, but the 860K crystal has only one competitor, with which it can pass tests on equal terms. This is an Intel Core i3 product. The world-renowned chip has only two cores and a small amount of cache memory, but this does not prevent it from demonstrating worthy performance in resource-intensive applications. As for synthetic tests, here is the undisputed leadership behind the AMD processor, but users are used to playing real computer games, rather than enjoy the results of some test programs.

Gaming potential

On the test stand, the AMD Athlon 860K chip, the price of which does not exceed 6,000 rubles, is able to demonstrate to the owner all its potential. However, to realize the full power of the overclocked crystal enthusiasts had to install a powerful video game adapter (Nvidia Titan X) and provide the platform with a large amount of RAM.

One of the most resource-intensive games, requiring high performance from the processor, Civilization Beyond Earth in the resolution of FullHD and at the maximum quality settings is able to work at a frequency of 88 frames per second. This is a serious indicator (the processor Intel Core i5 bypasses the product AMD Athlon 860K only 10%).

But fans of games Metro, Thief, World of Tanks and Hitman hardly fit the chip Kaveri. Achieve from the game more than 50 FPS at the maximum settings is simply impossible. Surprisingly, the 6-core representative of the AMD family demonstrates the best performance (40% performance gain).

Feedback

Every potential prospective buyer is always interested in knowing that people who are already happy owners think about the product. On the AMD Athlon x4 860K processor, a lot of feedback is positive and negative.

Most bad reviews are due to crystal overheating, even when operating at base frequencies. As practice shows, 90% of owners refused to use a regular cooler and provided the game system with a decent cooling system. True, the majority had a negative to the manufacturer, who knew about the problem with overheating and did not bother to equip his product with a copper radiator and a powerful fan.

For the hopelessness of the platform there were also quite a few users, but after the announcement of the new 8-core crystals for Socket FM2, the people calmed down. After all, AMD will not create new architectures for non-working platforms.

Finally

Yes, AMD Athlon 860K processor can be called game, even if the seller positions it in the budget class. Excellent potential in work, overclocking and low cost attract attention of potential buyers. However, before the acquisition, the future owner needs to take care not only of having powerful game components, but of a cooling system that can cool this powerful and hot processor.