AMD FX-4100 Quad Core 3.6GHz Bulldozer Processor Review

Total System 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 HAWX 2 the PC game for testing. We also tested a video
transcode using HandBrake 0.95 to see how the power draw on that was.

Benchmark Results: The AMD FX-4100 consumes 85 Watts at idle and 226 Watts in our gaming test. The idle numbers of the FX-4100 and the FX-8150 are nearly identical as the FX-4100 is basically the FX-8150 with some of the internals disabled. At load the you can see difference between the quad-core FX-4100 and the eight-core FX-8150. The AMD A8-3850 ‘Llano’ processor consumed far less power at idle, but consumed more than the FX-4100 in all three load scenarios.