AMD A6-3650 Llano APU Performance Review

Name: AMD A6-3650 Llano APU
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, August 02, 2011, 12:14 AM EDT

Before bringing this article to a close, we'll take a look at power consumption of the AMD A6-3650 and some competing platforms. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power this new APU was consuming with a power meter, versus other test systems we used for benchmarks in the previous pages. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling on the desktop and while under a heavy workload Keep in mind, this is total system power consumption being measured at the outlet and not the the individual CPUs or GPUs alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

** The Phenom II X4 980 System Used A Radeon HD 6570 Discrete GPU

Power consumption, especially when idle, is a strong point for AMD's Llano, and the A6-3650 in particular. We saw idle power consumption of only 51W from the 3650 and peak power consumption of 144W (while taxing the CPU and GPU cores), which was right on par with the Intel Core i5-2500 based system.

With some lower-speed / lower-voltage system memory and a bit of CPU undervolting, it would be interesting to see how low a Llano system could go. Mid 40 Watt territory should be doable.

Tags: AMD, GPU, CPU, Hybrid, Desktop, processor, Fusion, APU, Llano, A-Series, A6

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com