GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4 AMD FM2 Motherboard 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 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 play some Sleeping Dogs and took the maximum
power consumption during a benchmark session.

Benchmark Results: We weren’t expecting a huge power difference between the GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4 with the AMD A10-5800K ‘Trinity’ APU and the A75-D3H AMD A8-3870K ‘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 there is a solid performance gain between the two.