We didn’t have an opportunity to compare the power profiles of Intel’s 65 W Core i3-2100 and AMD’s Trinity-based APUs in our preview stories. However, now we have Core i3-3000-series chips to include instead.
The following chart is a power log of our entire test suite, which is scripted. That long stretch of fairly constant consumption in the middle is our Visual Basic 2010 benchmark, which lasts for almost an hour. Normally we’d have Blender and PCMark 7 as part of this capture, but stability issues on the Trinity-based system forced us to rem them from our batch file.

Here’s where AMD gets hammered. This power chart from June’s Trinity preview showed that, although the new architecture is effectively able to idle at lower power than Llano, it still butts right up to its 100 W thermal ceiling under load. That's a problem because AMD's competition is rated for 55 W.
Now, when we put A10-5800K overclocked, at its stock settings, and undervolted in the same chart as a Core i3-3225, we come away with a couple of different observations.
First, there’s an almost 50 W difference in average system power between the overclocked and undervolted A10-based configurations. That’s a greater-than 43% jump in overall consumption. Did performance increase commensurately? We doubt it, but we’ll get an exact answer on the next page.
Second, Intel’s advantage in manufacturing technology translates directly to its rated thermal design power, and we can see the result of that in an average system power consumption of 80 W. This says nothing of efficiency, of course, which involves a performance component. However, given what we now know about power (and what we saw on the preceding benchmark pages), it’d be almost impossible for AMD to catch up in the applications we’re testing today.
- Trinity: Great Gamer, But What About Power?
- A10-5800K: The Undervolt And Overclock
- Test Setup And Software
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11
- Benchmark Results: Adobe CS6
- Benchmark Results: Content Creation
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Compression Utilities
- Benchmark Results: Media Encoding
- Power Consumption
- Efficiency
- The Pursuit Of Balance Warms Our Hearts
At this price point, i would choose AMD Trinity.
Happy to set a couple of systems up and let you know what I find.
At this price point, i would choose AMD Trinity.
Happy to set a couple of systems up and let you know what I find.
So, it's probable that we're seeing a difference in configuration. It looks like Anand is using the Gigabyte A85X board and perhaps an older driver version. I'm on the MSI board and Cat 12.8, with a different Intel setup as well. On the Windows desktop, after 10 minutes on each config, I get 59 W for Intel and 67 W for AMD at idle.
Hopefully this articale can start to filter around particularly for the budget users which A-series is premised to target.
overclock the locked Intel chips? how do you suppose they do that? they weren't testing against Intel K series unlocked chips.
I can't be the only one who was waiting for the money shot of what is the difference in performance when you clock up from 800Mhz to >1000Mhz.
SUCH AN OVERSIGHT. UNFORGIVABLE!
1. overclocked/undervolted benchmarks for the i3 parts
2. dedicated gpu game benchmarks at 1440, 1680, 1920 for the A10 and the A8
3. More OpenCl benchmarks with and without dedicated GPUs for the i3 parts as well as the A10 parts
p.s. I realised I was getting thumbed up and down for this. do these seem like too many requests? nobody has covered trinity like toms and that too with superb writing quality. is it wrong for me to get greedy to read more of their stuff? :-) i'm addicted to this stuff is all. now if you'd excuse me, I have an F5 button to press.