Where its competitor Intel has decided to cut the air cooler out of its enthusiast-targeted Skylake CPU packages, perennial underdog AMD has doubled down. It’s launching a new, more efficient cooler alongside new desktop chips for gamers and non-gamers alike.
The new Wraith is AMD’s best air cooler to date, ships with the FX 8370 octa-core CPU, and is designed to handle its gutsy 125W TDP. With 24 per cent more surface area across its fins and 34 per cent more airflow overall, it’s one-tenth as noisy as AMD’s previous stock cooler attempts on high-end chips. The updated, less hardcore stock cooler shipping with AMD’s mainstream chips doesn’t have a cool name like Wraith — it’s just the company’s new “95W Thermal Solution”.
That’s the cooler that’ll ship with AMD’s new A10-7860K APU, which is a 4.0GHz (turbo-boosted) quad-core with eight 757MHz Radeon R7 graphics cores onboard. At a 65W TDP it’s more than sufficiently handled by the new air cooler. It also supports AMD’s FreeSync variable refresh rate tech out of the box. Mid-February is the projected launch date for that chip; at a $159 RRP it’s barely half the price of the next step up that is the $309 FX 8370.
Another new desktop processor — this one without Radeon graphics onboard — is the AMD Athlon X4 845, the first to use the company’s most-efficient-instructions-per-clock Excavator architecture. At 3.8GHz boost on all four of its cores, it’s an entry-level bargain for gamers that will pair it with a discrete graphics card; you’ll pay just $89 when it’s out in mid-February. [AMD]