Pros: What you need to know: This is basically the same chip as the A10-6700, just that the iGPU is disabled due to it having defects. What this means is that AMD, rather than throwing the silicon away, decide to simply shut the iGPU off and re-brand it as an Athlon at a low price. This is a win for AMD (the silicon isn't wasted) and it's a win for consumers (it's cheap and offers great performance.) This chip in particular is $5 more than the 750k version. That's because this revision is based on the Richland core, which uses Resonant Clock Mesh (it was present on Trinity, just not enabled for some reason) to allow the chip to reach higher clocks while simultaneously using less power. This is why it's possible to reach 5GHz on air with one of these on all four cores. Performance is about the same clock-for-clock as an FX-4300, barring L3 cache since these don't have L3 on the die. The L3 doesn't seem to make a difference in the benches I've seen and done, so don't be too worried about that. Works like a champ in games like Battlefield 3, Bioshock Infinite, Crysis 3, etc. Pair this thing up with a decent discreet GPU and you have one killer budget gaming rig.

Cons: Doesn't do my taxes, isn't Steamroller.

Overall Review: This will be a great processor for people who don't feel like spending a lot of money on a CPU. Various vendors will be releasing FM2+ boards soon, so if you're on the fence about this, I would recommend waiting a little bit for those to come out and then popping one of these in while you wait on Steamroller/Kaveri. You can expect to see more Athlon's based on the Steamroller microarchitecture sometime next year -- those will be the king of the budget processors.

Pros: Comes with all the connectors a builder who isn't doing a super-high end build would need, and the PSU itself is built out of quality components. Can easily push modest-to-mid-high end builds.

Cons: Not modular, but not a deal-breaker.

Overall Review: It doesn't look fancy and it's not modular, but it works and that's what counts. Not really much else to say about it.

Pros: This is simply some of the best thermal paste you can buy. It's cheap, it's effective, and it just works. Bought a tube of this back in Jan. 2013 and CPU is still running strong. Temps are always low, even under load.

Cons: What cons? Product does what it's supposed to do.

Pros: Pretty much just a fantastic chip all-around. I got this thing since it was just $85 when I was looking at it, and my current rig is using Socket FM1, so I said what the hell and went with it. This PC is one of those lame/semi-decent pre-built rigs you’ll find at your local retailer like Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Best Buy, etc., so the chip that was originally in it was the E2-3200, which is basically the lowest-tier APU that AMD ever did, lol. Obviously, the change in performance is ridiculously huge. I do gaming, both PC and emulator-based, some video and audio production, and of course general PC stuff like web-browsing and the like. I have no need to OC the CPU portion at all right now. 2.9GHz is good enough for now, and four true cores is a great bonus as well. AMD has this little sticker on the box that likens the CPU to an Athlon II X4, but in reality, this thing actually benches *higher* than most of, if not all of the Phenom II chips. Benched higher than the Phenom II X4 965 BE, which is insane seeing as how that CPU is one of those legendary CPU’s that people will be talking about years later when they remember the great CPU’s of the 2000’s/2010’s. The graphics perform pretty nicely as well. Yeah, you’re not gonna be running BF3 at 1080p on High or Ultra, but I don’t care. Truth is, most of the PC games I play are older titles from like 2010 and beyond. I’m one of the many who feel that devs need to step their game up, since recent games are mostly just okay or outright mediocre. That being said, I feel that this iGPU is good enough since it’ll max out older games with ease, even at high resolutions. Win-win for me. When devs start making WAY OF LIFE games again, THEN maybe I’ll go out and buy a separate discreet GPU. Til then, AMD’s APU’s will hold me over. The temps are also nice on this cheapo heatsink/fan. Never goes above 40C even after doing extensive video-watching, gaming, emulation, etc. Pretty good. Dunno what people who are complaining about fan noise and temps are talking about. Clean any dust out of your case, manage your cables properly, and make sure your room doesn’t feel like the Sahara Desert. Stuff like that should be common sense.

Cons: Hardly any. Has no L3 cache, and the graphics could be better, but this is the first major APU series, so they did great if you consider that. I won’t bother trying out the Dual Graphics capability, since when I do get a discreet GPU, it’ll be a pretty decent “mid-range” card like a GTX 660 or something.

Overall Review: It’s worth noting that since this was an OEM rig in general, I couldn’t use the stock heatsink that came with the chip. There was literally no way to mount it to the MOBO, and since I didn’t have any thermal compound on me, I had to go to a local store and buy some. No big deal. I cleaned off the original HSF and re-used it, and ironically it’s bigger and more efficient than the HSF that came with the chip. It’s silent and gets the job done, so I can’t comment on the stock HSF. Also when I bought the chip, it came with a voucher for Dirt Showdown, so that’s cool. Can’t complain about free games! All in all, if you’re looking at APU’s and you’re like me, a gamer on a budget, but who doesn’t care about playing the latest cutting-edge mediocre games, then you should just go to socket FM2 and get a Trinity APU. And even if you do feel the need to get a discreet GPU, you can just slap in any GPU you want and the APU will then disable the iGPU and act solely as a CPU. Really cool how AMD separated the APU’s logic enough so that the two sides can act independently like that. One last thing! Doesn’t matter what APU you choose, if you want the best possible graphics performance out of the iGPU, make sure you have fast RAM! I only have 4GB of 1333 MHz RAM at the moment, but for ideal performance, you’d want some 1866MHz RAM or even higher. The memory controller on these officially supports 1866 MHz natively, but people have OC’d to 2133 and even 2400 with no problems depending on the MOBO. Just a heads up. These APU’s also will use about 512MB of your RAM as VRAM, so keep that in mind as well.