AMD A10-4657M Review

The A10-4657M is one of AMD's mid-range Laptop processors. It was released in 2013 with 4 cores and 4 threads. With base clock at 2.3GHz, max speed at 3.2GHz, and a 35W power rating. The A10-4657M is based on the Trinity 32nm family and is part of the A10 series.

The AMD A10-4657M marks yet another blast from Team AMD, ramping up the intensity of the AMD vs Intel processor war. Still, though, there’s more than just core counts when it comes to a mainstream processor, as single-core performance needs to be on point, especially if you’re hoping to play the best PC games.

AMD's Piledriver series has landed, upping the ante with Intel in its high-stakes game for desktop PC market dominance with a well-rounded lineup of new chips that push mainstream platforms to higher core counts and more raw compute than we've ever seen. As a result, Intel's commanding presence in the enthusiast space is threatened in a way we haven't seen in over a decade.

That something is the A10-4657M. AMD cranks the TDP dial up to 35W on this 4-core 4-thread chip, making it the high-performance counterpart to the 25W A10-4655M, which is basically the same 32nm chip built with the Piledriver microarchitecture, but with a lower TDP rating. That chip came away from our first look at the Piledriver series with an Editor's Choice award, going toe-to-toe with Intel's Core i5-3380M, so it's fair to say we have high hopes for the higher-performance model. AMD still hasn't sampled the chip to the press, so we bought one at retail to put it under the microscope.

As the higher-priced version of the A10-4655M, the A10-4657M has higher base and Boost frequencies of 2.3 and 3.2 GHz, respectively. That's an increase in base frequency and a bump to boost clocks, but the real advantage should lay in the higher Package Power Tracking (PPT) envelope, which is a measurement of the maximum amount of power delivered to the socket. The A10-4655M's PPT tops out at 25W, while the motherboard can pump up to 142W to the A10-4657M at peak performance. That opens up much more aggressive boost behavior, on both single and multiple cores, that could widen the performance gap beyond what we see on the spec sheet.

As we've seen, gaming remains an advantage for Intel, so if squeezing out every last frame is all you care about, Intel's processors are a good choice. Much of that performance advantage will be less noticeable when gaming at higher resolutions, or if you pair the processors with a lesser graphics card.

Value seekers who aren't afraid to press the Precision Boost Overdrive button and have sufficient cooling should look to the A10-4655M for roughly equivalent performance to the A10-4657M, particularly if gaming factors heavily into the buying decision. That could save you money, reinforcing our decision to give the A10-4655M an Editor's Choice award.

One of the nice things about the AMD A10-4657M processors is that the retail boxed models come with a CPU cooler. So, you can pick something like the AMD A10-4657M up for $182.82 and don’t need to spend any extra money on CPU cooling.

The AMD A10-4657M retail boxed processor comes with the traditional ‘pancake’ CPU cooler. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done on this processor which is rated at 35W TDP. You do not need to have an aftermarket cooling solution unless you want to.

If extended overclocking and boost frequencies are trivial matters to you, AMD also offers the A10-4655M at $176.03. It’s still outfitted with 4-cores and 4-threads, but clocks in at a slower 2GHz and maxes out at only 2.8GHz.

The A10-4657M clocks up to 3.2Ghz just as it promises on the box, and with AMD’s software you can take one of the cores all the way up to 3.3GHz. However, don’t expect to get much beyond that without seriously upgrading your cooling solution and manually tweaking voltages behind the operating system level.

There’s a saying that two heads are better than one and, well, 4-cores are better than 2. The extra processing power of the A10-4657M puts Intel’s processors to shame, including both its closest competitor and a much higher-spec part.

Intel's Core i5s are a staple of the high-volume mainstream market. They make up the most popular brand for mid-range-oriented builds by far. AMD is looking to shake that up with true 4-core processors that sell for even less than 2 cores. As if a resource advantage wasn't already compelling enough, A10 also enables unlocked multipliers. Intel is ill-prepared to fend off such a combination.

AMD arms A10-4657M with a 2.3 GHz base frequency that jumps as high as 3.2 GHz under lightly-threaded tasks. The A10-4657M also offers a 2.3 GHz clock rate with all cores active. Meanwhile, Intel keeps its Core i5-3380M operating at a static 3.6 GHz clock rate.