AMD A8-3850 2.9GHz Llano APU Review

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 3DMark Vantage the performance preset and took the maximum
power consumption during the first GPU test. We also tested a video
transcode using HandBrake 0.95 to see how the power draw on that was.

Benchmark Results: The Intel
Core i3-2105 Processor is a dual-core processor that has a maximum TDP
of 65 Watts. Much to our amazement our test system hit 66.8W on this
processor during full load with Prime 95 64-bit and the platform idled
at just 36.7 Watts. The AMD A8-3850 APU has a TDP of 100W, so we expect
it to use more power. At an idle the AMD A8-3850 is amazingly power
friendly and used just 36.2W! When running benchmarks like 3DMark
Vantage or a torture test like Prime 95 64-bit we saw the power jump up
to 135W and 157W, respectively. The AMD A8-3850 clearly uses more power
at load than the Intel Core i3-2105, but as you saw in the benchmarks
the AMD A8-3850 also had slightly better performance across the board.