AMD Trinity A10-4600M Processor Review

If you're shopping for a notebook you're likely very interested in what kind of battery life you can expect from a system, unless you're considering a desktop replacement machine.  Here we're put AMD's new Trinity architecture through its paces in our power consumption and battery tests.

Trinity A10-4600M Power Consumption and System Battery Life System Power Consumption, Efficiency and Battery Life

The results below are from our combined Battery Eater Pro (worst case) and Web Browsing only (almost best case) tests. BEP beats on the CPU, GPU, disk and memory while it renders a 3D image and rotates it in real time on the screen. Our light duty, web browser test refreshes a web page of mixed text, graphics, HTML and Flash, every 3 minutes. Both tests are run with display brightness set to 50% with no sleep timers enabled. All other power plan options were left as delivered from the manufacturer.  We should note that all tests below were conducted on the integrated graphics core of the CPU in each notebook.

In our Battery Eater Pro and Web Browser battery drain test, AMD's Trinity prototype whitebook put up very respectable numbers falling just short of the ever-svelte Acer Aspire Ultrabook here.  We should also note that each machine's battery capacity is different and the AMD prototype is enabled with only a relatively modest 6-cell battery. 


In our System Power Consumption test, at idle the Trinity prototype system drew about 11 Watts just sitting on the desktop.  This number was recorded with the battery fully charged, so it was straight system draw.  That's pretty darn nice.

Under full CPU load the system drew 53 Watts and under full CPU and GPU load combined (represented in the screen shot above), the entire system only drew about 62 Watts.  It's abundantly clear that AMD's claims of power-efficiency in Trinity are well-founded and fair.