AMD A8-5600K Trinity Desktop APU 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: The AMD A8-5600K was the lowest power consumption in all three of our tests, well almost all three. The gaming numbers show the Intel Core i7 3770K beating the the A8-5600K but the performance of the 3770K is nowhere near that of on of the AMD APU’s. At idle, the A8-5600K was sipping power at only 26 Watts, under a CPU load in Prime95 it was pulling 112 Watts, and gaming in Sleeping Dogs it pulled only 86 Watts.