It is perhaps telling of AMD’s place in the CPU game that the cooler is receiving almost as much attention as the chips themselves. However, it is playing an important role in this new chip release, as it’s the additional cooling power of the Wraith stock cooler which is making it possible to bump up performance on the 7890K.
Operating at 200MHz more than its slightly-lower-end cousin, the 7870K, that bump in clock speed is thanks to the added cooling potential of the Wraith. It allows the 7890K to reach a turbo speed of 4.3GHz, making it the most powerful APU that AMD currently offers.
It’s not much more expensive than its slower variant, despite the added power. At $165 with the new cooler included, it represents a reasonable option for gamers on a budget – especially considering they may not have to fork out for an aftermarket CPU chiller now too.
However, it may still be better to opt for the A10-7870K instead, as it its price tag is just $140, and AMD has seen fit to sell it with a “new 125W thermal solution,” which appears to be just the Wraith cooler without the plastic shroud. At the same TDP as the 7890K, it seems likely that overclocking it by a small margin should be perfectly viable.
Also released alongside the new high-end APU and cooler combination is an entry-evel solution, the AMD Athlon X4 880K. Based on the FM2 architecture, the 880K also benefits from a 300MHz bump over its predecessor, the 860K. The 880K is also unlocked, so it could potentially be boosted to much higher speeds.
Aimed at low-end gaming desktops, this quad-core chip is priced at just $95, so it’s far from an expensive solution. And it comes with that same de-shrouded Wraith cooler as the 7870K.
It’s thought that this push for low-end gaming may be AMD’s way of reconnecting its CPUs with gamers, before hitting them much harder later this year with the Zen launch, which is expected to be more competitive with Intel offerings in terms of performance and efficiency.
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