AMD APUs vs Windows XP Part Three: A10-6790K with Radeon HD8670D

To Modern for Windows XP?

Release Date: October 2013 RRP £105

Purchased: March 6 2025 £12.89 + p&p

Introduction

I had good results with the FM1 APUs I tested previously—they turned out to be surprisingly solid choices for Windows XP. Performance was respectable across the board, with most games running well and falling (roughly) within the 2000s timeline.

Everything tested was playable, sometimes with reduced settings, though I did encounter a few odd behaviours in certain titles.

It got me thinking: could a later APU still support XP and offer everything a retro gamer might need, eliminating the need for a discrete GPU?

I didn’t venture too far into the 2010s—just enough to experiment with an FM2 system from around 2013, which I hoped would still cooperate with XP, despite the OS already being twelve years old at that point.

My assumption was that if the FX processors were supported, then surely FM2 would be as well… right? In hindsight, I probably should have looked into it more thoroughly.

Since FM2 uses a different socket, I had to start hunting for a compatible motherboard—and that led me to the listing below on eBay:

Far more feature rich than that crappy Biostar FM1 board used previously.

That pair of PCI-E slots which may be useful in the future – crossfire with a paid of HD6670’s maybe? That could be a fun experiment.

For a cheap APU to test I went back to Ali Express, delivery was quick enough and easy as I’ve always found.

This A10 example is pretty high end but not the best of its generation which would have been able to support DDR3-2133.

I actually didn’t spot that the A10 6800k supported faster RAM or I would spent a little more to get some – as the system RAM doubles as VRAM with an APU, faster Ram can only be better.

Still, at least I have that nice kit of Kingston HyperX Fury 1866Mhz that I used on the FM1 system that I can just use.

The GPU side

The HD8670D was the best of the APU graphics processor parts, with the highest clock speeds and most shaders. to be honest it looks like the top three only differ by the clock speed.

Compared to the FM1 APUs tested previously, the improvements were not very exciting, except for the addition of 6 new compute units—though these were based on the older Terascale architecture and not the true GCN compute units, so not quite as futuristic as they might sound.

FM2 APUs brought in these modular Compute Units, each packing 64 shader processors which was a nice step up from the old clusters before.

They’re great for modern software that knows how to use them, but, would Windows XP or DirectX 9 even know what to do with all this newer technology?

Here’s GPU-Z screenshot of my example showing everything is as expected. It is helping itself to 768Mb of system RAM up from the 512Mb used by the FM1 APU’s – I wonder if this comes out of the 3.5Gb available in 32bit XP or from the larger 8Gb that is physically in the system?

Installation and Setup

I wasn’t expecting too much of an issue getting XP running on this system and.. things were a little more challenging. It seems that the 6000 series of APU’s were the first that didn’t actually support Windows XP, oops.

Still, WinXP Integral edition did it’s thing and installed itself, I then downloaded the latest APU drivers from the AMD website and installed them and the catalyst control centre.. a restart and I logged in to see 4 colours and the a 640 x 480 resolution – not ideal.

Well, using the limited display given to me I managed to get the Snappy Driver installer up and running which had a later driver which was installed. Another restart and everything was back to glorious 1280 x 1024 with 32 bit colour – a little strange I thought, but all work now, right?

Well, the sound chip was also a pain to get working, the most official looking driver on the Gigabyte website didn’t work but I had the Realtek chip number from the motherboard so googled that again (when did getting drivers from the internet get so painful?).

In the end I did get it installed but even when working there was some hissing in the background which was not idea.

I dropped in an old PCI Sound Blaster Live – I wanted to keep this system semi-permanently to play games on and having proper accelerated sound is one of the reasons to love XP (it was discontinued in later windows versions as I understand).

I noticed in BIOS (which was I flashed to the latest non-beta version F5) that the boost clock was disabled, so I enabled that – the 4.0Ghz processors should boost to 4.3Ghz. Sadly, WinXP couldn’t handle such an exciting concept and the system would crash without fail every timeshortly after booting to the desktop. 4.0 Ghz it is then, pretty speedy by any measure especially for running XP.

All finally up and running then, or so I thought.

Clearly this was at the edge of compatibility but Windows was flying along though and I left the Sanctuary Benchmark running for some time to ensure stability.

All fine-ish then.

The Test System

I recently found a version of MSI Afterburner that runs on WinXP! I will be using this for all future benchmarking as it is so much more convenient than Fraps.

I’m sure that the two pieces of software cause marginally different overheads to whilst the system is running it.

It’s perhaps not ideal to use two different monitoring systems when comparing hardware, but who is really using these articles as buying guides for old, and very cheap software.

The specs of the system as follows:

• AMD A10-6970K APU incorporating Radeon HD8670D
• Gigabyte GA-FSA75M-D3H
• 2 x 4Gb DDR3 1866Mhz Ram (showing as 3.5Gb on 32 Bit XP)
• Windows XP (build 2600, Service Pack 3)
• 2x 120Gb SSD’s (Ali Express Unbranded)
• AMD GPU Drivers 9.0.300.3010.

Here are the benchmarks:

Benchmark One: Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003)

Well, a disappointing start really, sure it’s faster but probably just due to the increase in the clock speed of the GPU.

This is an old DirectX 8 game though, so no surprise that it is unable to take advantage of newer graphical features.. perhaps that’s true for anything running on Win XP.

The 1% Low figure was hitting the maximum refresh rate of the monitor so I increased the resolution. The hit to performance was minimal and things did look a lot better.

Benchmark Two: Far Cry (2004)

This was a bit of a disaster on the older FM1 APU’s, I wasn’t sure if it was something wrong with the system that I built at the time – perhaps a driver issue or something not set up correctly.

So it was with mixed feelings that I found exactly the same – awful performance with the higher presents but great performance from medium and below:

Everything in this system is different except for the RAM (which was the same for the A8 but a different kit was used on the A4).

I did run things with the High preset but low on ‘Environmental’ thinking the thick grass could be the issue but had the same results.

Strange and frustrating. the old X1300 cards were doing better with their (admittedly on-card) DDR2 memory.

Benchmark Three: Rome: Total War – (2004)

Back to Rome: Total War. Note how the screenshot below shows that this is actually a DirectX 8 title. It apparently just uses some DX9 features, which was news to me.

Performance is largely similar to the older A8 APU with actually worse 1% lows.

I pushed things to 1280 x 1024 just to see what would happen, nothing good it seems!

Afterburner was acting strange in this title, the GPU showing as 1% utilisation and a very cool 10 degrees which is unlikely!

Despite this odd behaviour, the results which seem to stack up.

Benchmark Three: Hitman: Contracts – (2004)

Left as a title here as I tested the A4 and A8 FM1 processors. The A8 was hitting the 60fps frame cap with everything switched on at 1280 x 1024 – it didn’t seem like a good use of time to test again on later hardware.

Benchmark Five: Star Wars Republic Commando (2005)

Hitting the cap with the A8 and the same with the A10, no suprises here.

Benchmark Six: F.E.A.R Extraction Point (2005)

1% Lows down, average framerate up again, definitely a pattern emerging here.

Benchmark Seven: FlatOut 2 (2006)

A slight stutter as you load into the game is quickly forgotten by Afterburner as the frames are counted, within half a lap the 1% low and even 0.1% is all locked at the 75 fps framecap.

This probably didn’t need testing to be honest as the A8 gave the same. Still, it’s a fun game so and I wanted to see what Afterburner had to say.

interesting how it reports 99% GPU utilisation to hit this frame cap, you would think that it may need to work less hard if it was finding pushing 75FPS so hard.

Benchmark Eight: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – (2006)

Back to running about in Oblivion and, in a familiar story the 1% low performance has dropped whilst average framerate has improved.

So, you may as well use the A8 if you’re limited to seeing 75fps through your monitor as I am.

Still, you can play oblivion comfortably without a discrete graphics card which I guess is one of the conclusions we can reach.

Benchmark Nine: Colin McRae: DiRT (2007)

Weird results here, great performance beating the A8 hands-down on 1% low and average framerate.

For some reason in this game everything seems to work fine.

Benchmark Ten: Crysis (2007)

But can it run Crysis? Well, no, it will not start.

There isn’t too much to play with in the settings of the game itself, I tried a slightly earlier driver from the Snappy Driver installer and checked that DX9.0C was correctly installed and available.

A freshly reinstalled copy came with the same result.

Dodgy drivers and compatibility options I would say.

Under Windows 7 this game runs fine (albeit under DX10 and 64 Bit Mode).. things seemed to run well but the results don’t belong in this article.

Pretty disappointing!

Benchmark Eleven: Assassin’s Creed (2007)

Same story with the frame drops. Clearly there are issues.

Overclocking

The K in A10 6970K means that this part can be overclocked so it would be rude not to give it a go.

The following games were not tested on the older APU’s so I ran a few passes, with and without overclocking.

I did the overclocking in BIOS, I pushed the GPU clock speed up to 1000Mhz and the CPU clock to a standard 4300Mhz (where it would boost do if WinXP supported such a feature).

I also gave the GPU access to a full 1Gb of RAM where it has 768Mb as stock.

Things were immediately stable though pushing the CPU higher caused a crash when loading windows – likely I needed to add more voltage but I wasn’t too interested in seeing how far I could push the thing.

Perhaps I should have tried for more, these changes did not make a whole lot of difference.

Results as follows:

Benchmark Twelve: Battlefield Bad Company 2 (2010)

A bit of a struggle this one, especially with High settings but then this is the most modern game here.

The Medium settings will see you through but it still didn’t feel overly smooth – definitely playable though.

The screenshot above shows the view at high settings – a pretty game with lots of effects.

Look at that difference when running the medium setting overclocked, the extra clock speed and/or bigger RAM buffer seemingly preventing the frame drop.

I went back to retest this and got the same result.. that’s what it says, pretty crazy.

Benchmark Thirteen: Doom 3 (2004)

Data collected via the in-game benchmark system, running the benchmark twice and recording the second result.

The average FPS collected by afterburner matches that given by the game – but with the advantage of 1% Low figures being given

Good performance but those 1% lows lag well behind the average framerate.

The actual game is limited to 60fps anyway so Ultra settings at 1280 x 1024 is perfectly playable.

As for stock vs overclocked? I may as well not have bothered.. all results are rounded to the closest full number so perhaps there was a tiny difference but rounding killed it.

Benchmark Fourteen: Neverwinter Nights 2 (2006)

This is an ugly old game engine here, even when pushed to it’s limit.

Still the mechanics are fun enough enough and I’m trying to get into the story.

I did push up all the settings to full on this, every option there was to switch on was on it’s highest, so things can get smoother.

Overclocking lead to very similar results, for some reason actually coming in lower than the stock values.

Synthetic Benchmark Comparison

Well, if the games did not show much of an improvement over prior generations, the benchmarks surely did as shown in the below.

3d Mark 2001 SE

	A4 3400	A8 3870	A10 6970K	A10 6970K (OC)
3d Mark Score	21,598	27,998	31,428	31,860

3d Mark 2003

	A4 3400	A8 3870	A10 6970K	A10 6970K (OC)
Score	11,719	19,298	27,073	28,064
Fill Rate (Single Texturing)	1,823.0	2,564.90	3,112.70	3115.90
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing)	4,635.50	11,036.60	17,758.50	19,808.60
Pixel Shader 2.0	156.20	185.0	261.5	272.3

3d Mark 2006

	A4 3400	A8 3870	A10 6970K	A10 6970K (OC)
Score	4932	6951	11,178	11,522
Shader Model 2.0 Score	1564	2208	3798	3920
HDR/Shader Model 3.0 Score	2287	2998	5021	5177
CPU Score	2296	4529	4855	4984

Unigine Sanctuary

	A4 3400	A8 3870	A10 6970K	A10 6970K (OC)
Score	1060	2160	3182	3412
Average FPS	25	50.9	75.1	80.5
Min FPS	16.7	35.1	52.2	56.7
Max FPS	66.4	31.9	98	104.9

Summary and Conclusion

The first conclusion to draw is that I should really research what is and isn’t actually compatible before doing a whole bunch of testing and scratching my head as to the strange results.

The A10 6790K is a four core processor running at 4.0Ghz, clearly more than capable for anything that you could run on Windows XP without any issues.

The drivers available don’t seem to hinder the processor at all, things ran so well on the CPU side that I didn’t really notice that it wasn’t officially supported.

The GPU side still works fine enough, even with the dodgy drivers it’s still going to outperform early 2000’s graphics cards.

The problem is that the software can’t take advantage of it’s compute units and DirectX 11 capabilities leaving pretty lackluster real-world performance when comparing to the APU’s of three years prior.

I was hoping that a more modern APU would be an amazing overkill XP system, potentially in a tiny low-power format and I could say it’s all you need to play all your XP games.

I can’t say that though.. but I may be being unfair.. an A10 5000 series review to follow at some point. Actual research suggests that the previous generation were the last to be supported.