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