AMD Fusion Hits Retail: Zotac and Gigabyte E-350s

Name: AMD Fusion Hits Retail: Zotac and Gigabyte E-350s - Page 8
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 09:00 AM EDT

Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test systems consumed using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power the base platform configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the processors alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

Our power consumption tests revealed some interesting results. For one, the Zotac Zbox HD AD03, despite being fully configured with Wi-Fi, USB 3.0, a Blu-Ray drive, etc, sipped power while idle and came in only a few watts ahead of the reference platform, yet well below the other systems. Under a heavy CPU load, consumption spiked to only 23 watts. Although it is not in the graph, we also tested with a full GPU workload and saw power consumption go up to 29 watts.

The Gigabyte motherboard, however, had much higher power consumption. While still low overall, idle power use on the Gigabyte E350N-USB3 was much higher than the Zotac system. AMD informs us that board partners are still optimizing BIOS and voltage settings and consumption of competing board from some other manufacturers are somewhat lower.

Tags: AMD, Gigabyte, Zotac, Fusion, APU, ZBox HD

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