AMD A8-7650K APU and A68H chipset review - Power Consumption

Power Consumption

Power consumption wise AMD was able to keep the TDP of these APUs on track, either 45W, 65W or 95W depending on your choice of APU and in this case, the A8-7650K comes with a BIOS preference you can configure at 45W or 65W. The APU is a pretty clever product when it comes to its power design and power states. Not only can the processor cores independently be throttled down, lowering voltage and what not, there are different power states inside the APU allowing nearly complete shutdown of segments/domains within the APU. For example, if the GPU is not used, it can be powered or slowed down. The same goes for CPU cores. 

We ran the AMD APU both with and without a dedicated graphics card. Without one (using the internal IGP) the PC idles at only 25 Watts, that's pretty sexy really. When we place load on the CPU and we see the power draw rise the system now consumes roughly 100 Watts. This is with merely an SSD and 16 GB memory installed. Your average PC will draw a little more power if you add optical drives, HDDs, soundcards etc. On a side note; all these kinds of variables can make a difference in power consumption in general. Interesting to see is that the idle power consumption jumps up to 56 Watt once we insert a dedicated graphics card, that is a lot.

Aside from the (dGPU) entry the rest all is IGP based. I want to make it very clear that power consumption measurements will differ per PC and setup. Your attached components use power but your motherboard can have additional ICs installed like audio controller, LUCID chips, network controllers, extra SATA controllers, extra USB controllers, and so on. These parts all consume power.