AMD FX-8350 8-Core Black Edition Processor Review

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 the power supplies, case fans, video cards and hard drives. 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 real world scenarios, we decided to drop Furmark and ran 3DMark 11 on the performance preset and took the maximum power consumption during the first GPU test.

Benchmark Results: At idle our two FX processors are drawing similar Wattages, the FX-8350 is slightly lower pulling only 84 Watts compared to 87 Watts from the FX-8150. The power while gaming is considerably lower with the AMD FX-8350 which pulls only 286 Watts while the FX-8150 pulls 309 Watts. Our CPU load numbers have me a little concerned. The FX-8350 is pulling 10 Watts more under load than the FX-8150. The FX-8350 is supposed to be more power efficient than the previous generation.