Power Consumption
Power Consumption
Here's where we'll slowly move into actually testing the processors and respective chipsets. Now testing devices with so little power draw is a little icky and tricky to do.
Example of how we measure power consumption
So we monitor the setup in three conditions, IDLE, 100% CPU load and High Definition 1080P playback. Let's have a peek at the numbers.
Now granted, I was hoping to see slightly better power consumption here. The APU should consume a maximum of 18W, the IO chip roughly 4 watts, then we add a SSD and one DVD-ROM. In idle we see a power draw of 38 Watt. Under CPU load roughly 44 Watt and when watching 1080P High Definition content (GPU accelerated) two Watts more at 46 Watt.
I know that the Gigabyte board consumes a little more than the MSI and ASUS ones though. We hope to see a BIOS update soon fixing this and shaving off a little more wattage. Come to think of it, the additional USB 3.0 controller of course will also need some power so that might be the responsible factor here.