AMD FX-8150 Processor Review – Bulldozer Arrives

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-8150 has really impressive idle test results as the processor consumes just 84 Watts at idle. When transcoding on all eight cores or playing a game the power numbers start to jump up though and the Intel Core i7-990X and the AMD FX-8150 processor were consuming roughly the same about of power in Prime 95 and HandBrake benchmarking. We had hopes that the 32nm process would help this 8-core processor cut down on load power use, but it uses more power than 45nm processors like the Phenom II X6 1100T.