AMD A10-5800K Trinity Desktop APU Review

Noise Testing & Power Consumption

To measure the noise from the CPU cooler we used an Extech sound level meter with 1.5dB accuracy that meets Type 2 standards. This meter ranges from 35dB to 90dB on the low measurement range, which is perfect for us as our test room usually averages around 37dB. We measure the sound level six inches above the bottom edge of the motherboard with ‘A’ frequency weighting. The microphone wind cover is used to make sure no wind is blowing across the microphone, which would seriously throw off the data.

At an idle the retail boxed AMD CPU cooler for the A10-5800K processor was observed at 40.7dB when at idle and it hit 47.7dB when under 100% CPU load. Not bad, but under full load you can most certainly hear the CPU cooler over anything else in the room. This cooler certainly appears to be good enough, but you can easily reduce the noise and temperatures by using an aftermarket enthusiast cooler.

Power Consumption:

Since power consumption is a big deal these days, we ran some simple
power consumption tests on our test beds. The systems ran with identical
power supplies, Solid-Sate Drives, Memory kits and motherboards from
the same company. To measure idle usage, we ran the system at idle for
one hour on the desktop with no screen saver and took the measurement.
For load measurements, Prime95’s in-place large FFT’s were run on all
cores to make sure each and every processor was at 100% load for maximum
power consumption and heat. Curious about other test scenarios, we
decided to Battlefield 3 and took the maximum
power consumption during a benchmark session.

Benchmark Results: We weren’t expecting a huge power difference between the AMD A10-5800K ‘Trinity’ APU and the AMD A8-3850 ‘Llano’ APU, but we were pleasantly surprised when we saw a very nice decrease in power. The Trinity system used 23% less power at idle and 24% less power in Prime 95 than the Llano system! In games the AMD A10-5800K did use a tad bit more power than the A8-3870K processor though.