AMD A6-7310 Review

The A6-7310 is one of AMD's entry-level-low-power Laptop processors. It was released in 2015 with 4 cores and 4 threads. With base clock at 2.4GHz, max speed at 2.4GHz, and a 12W power rating. The A6-7310 is based on the Carrizo-L 28nm family and is part of the A6 series.

A6-7310 is also the successor of AMD's last gen A6-6310 processor that was based on the Puma and 28nm process and was released in 2014.

The AMD A6-7310 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 Puma+ 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.

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.

One of the nice things about the AMD A6-7310 processors is that the retail boxed models come with a CPU cooler. So, you can pick something like the AMD A6-7310 up for $258.35 and don’t need to spend any extra money on CPU cooling.

The AMD A6-7310 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 12W TDP. You do not need to have an aftermarket cooling solution unless you want to.

The A6-7310 clocks up to 2.4Ghz just as it promises on the box, and with AMD’s software you can take one of the cores all the way up to 2.5GHz. 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 A6-7310 puts Intel’s processors to shame, including both its closest competitor and a much higher-spec part.

Fresh from a successful roll-out of mainstream A6 CPUs, AMD's attack on Intel now extends down into the entry-level-low-power with its A6-7310 processors, which the company is making available as of 7 May 2015.