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Final Thoughts
Lets break down and discuss the pros and cons of the new Trinity APU as well as the 5800K in a couple different scenarios:
Gaming / Enthusiast
I can see the mid-range gaming community loving this upgrade: People who want an OEM Laptop/desktop that will play games was lost until Llano and Trinity. Even people who want to build their own and have an upgrade path in mid (Crossfire, Dual graphics) must consider the Trinity APU an as option. However I don’t see the enthusiast market embracing Trinity: that not who it’s designed for.
Everyday User / Workstation Application
The everyday user has much to gain also: Trinity can output 1080p resolution in Eyefinity display groups which in the past was unheard of. Trinity also has no problem performing every day tasks Web browsing, E-mail, word processing. The only downfall I can see here is the maximum of 4 cores for the APU line.
As we can see Trinity brings a very specific set of attributes which are great for the beginning/average user. They also provide an upgrade path for someone looking to invest over time into a PC rather than dropping a chunk of change at once.
The A10-5800k performs much better in both CPU and GPU benchmarking making it a great upgrade. However the overclocking on the CPU side leaves some to be desired. Granted it isn’t meant to be a CPU powerhouse, but if overclocking doesn’t produce tangible results, why overclock? At the time of writing the A10-5800k is $122 putting it at the same price-point at an i3-2120 from Intel (give or take a few dollars). Both are Quad-Cores (considering Intels’ hyper-threading), and both have integrated video. With the A10-5800k you gain better graphical and multimedia performance but with the i3-2120 you gain better computational performance. With its performance, features, and price in mind we are awarding the A10-5800k our Silver Award.
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So far this is the most promising release from AMD in the past couple years. I hope they are able to refocus and maintain.