I recently built a build based off of the A10-5800k not thinking I would have much for a build. I now have some unexpected money and I want to add a graphics card to my system. I was thinking about buying a 7970 but I'm wondering if and how much my CPU may bottleneck the card. I can't find any benchmarks showing it and thats what I'm looking for. If anyone has any proof one way or another please share. Thanks
Personally, I'd opt for a 7870 Tahiti LE, and save the rest for some games. I don't think the A10 will hold it back too much, but if it does, there should be some room for overclocking. An OC'd A10 will probably be pretty good, considering they use Piledriver cores.
I don't plan on OCing anytime soon
It's probably going to become "some" form of a bottleneck then. The A10-5800 is based on the same piledriver cores as the FX4300 and have an equivalent compute performance so you'd be effectively running one of those when you drop the card in your setup. The chip's cpu OC fairly easily with minimal voltage increases. Going up a few hundred mhz would probably help you out even if the bottleneck wasn't directly apparent. Personally I couldn't justify putting a 7970 into a system like that and NOT overclocking the cpu anyway. You're already paying the premium to get a 7970 (which almost none are reference) that was built to be an overclocking monster. Just like the gpu, you can be getting for performance that is just waiting around to be tapped by the end-user.
I went with a 7950 and I'm gonna save the rest to buy a heatsink for my CPU. The main reason I don't OC is because all I have is the stock fan.
7950 is a solid choice; beast of an overclocker too. It's possible to OC on stock cooler with APU's, especially if you aren't using the GPU portion, but something like a Cooler Master Hyper 212 should do the trick. On stock, you can likely get 4.3GHz if you have decent ambient temps. that's what the people over at LegitReviews got. They switched to a AM3+ Bulldozer box cooler and got 4.6GHz out of it.
t the end of the day overclocking the AMD A10-5800K A-Series Trinity APU was interesting. The AMD A10-5800K boosts up to 4200MHz right out of the box, so we were expecting to get well over that on air. With the stock CPU cooler that comes with this processor we were able to get 4300MHz with full stability and 4400MHz with a bit of throttling if the room temperature was hot and the processor was at full load. To get an extra 100-200 MHz out of processor is far from exciting, but we were being limited by the CPU cooler. With the CPU switched out to a larger and better design we were able to reach 4600MHz with full stability. This is a much nicer overclock. With a high-quality aftermarket air cooler or a water cooling solution you should be able to easily hit right around 5GHz with ease. We used a Corsair H100 water cooler and was able to hit 5GHz with stability on this processor.