AMD A10-5800K Trinity Desktop APU Review

Temperature Testing

It’s tough to do temperature testing without a thermo chamber, but the least we can do is show you the temperature numbers we saw on the AMD A10-5800K APU as we tested it.

AMD told us that they are not changing the CPU coolers on their A-Series APU’s, so all the Trinity based processors come with the same low-cost cooler that came with all the Llano APU’s. This CPU cooler is all aluminum with a small and quiet fan on them.

When it comes to performance it is so-so, but that is to be expected as has no copper base plate or heat pipes. For testing we used this 4-pin fan with all the settings at ‘AUTO’ in the BIOS.

The ambient air temperature in the room was 75F or 24C. The Gigabyte EasyTune6 software showed that our CPU had a temperature of 17C at idle with the fan spinning at ~1750 RPM. This is odd as it was below the room temperature, but remember CPU voltage is derived from the voltages inside the processor, so things are always a bit funky with temperatures.

To get load temperatures we fired up Prime 95 and ran the torture test for half an hour. We used the “In-place large FFTs” test, which we feel is the best test to run for heating up processors. The CPU quickly topped out at 61C at ~3200 RPM. The CPU temperature fluctuated around 58-61C for the hour that we ran Prime95 64-bit. No errors were encountered. It appears that the factor HSF is good enough, but an aftermarket cooler would help lower temps and reduce the noise.