AMD Athlon 5350 APU and AM1 Platform Review - Power Consumption

Power Consumption

Power consumption wise AMD was able to keep the TDP of these APUs on track, all Athlon and Sempron models have a maximum 25 Watt TDP. 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. 

Our 'PC' idles at only 22 Watts, that's nice. When we place load on the CPU and we see the power draw rise the system now consumes roughly 35 Watts. This is with merely an SSD and 4 GB memory installed. Your average PC can draw a little more power if you add optical drives, HDDs, soundcards etc. All these kinds of variables can make a difference in power consumption in general.

Above a couple of measurements depening on different types of load. Gaming BTW 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.