AMD A8-3870K Unlocked Llano Quad-Core APU Review
Total System Power Consumption
Before bringing this article to a close, we'll take a look at power consumption of the A8-3870K 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.
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The A8-3870K's idle power consumption was relatively low when compared to Intel's offerings and the older AMD platform (which requires a discrete or motherboard GPU). Load power, however, was much higher than Intel's. Overclocking the A8-3870K also resulted in significantly higher power consumption--which is to be expected--but at under 200W while loaded, it's still much lower than the Phenom II.
