
Averaging together system power use from the previous page, the overclocked A10-5800K uses more than 155 W, which is 33 W higher than an A10-5800K at its stock settings.
Undervolting the APU to 1.275 V helps cut consumption by 14.3 W on average, though there is a cumulative performance hit of about two minutes (hardly anything when you’re talking about an almost two-hour run).
But none of the APUs finish the suite as quickly or average the same low power consumption of Intel’s Core i3-3225, which averages 80 W.

When you break down the time it takes to complete the many benchmarks in our suite, the difference between the fastest and slowest chip is less than six minutes.
This chart is an unlikely representation of something AMD keeps trying to pound into our heads: the nebulous idea of experience. Will you notice six minutes over the course of 20 back-to-back demanding tasks? Almost certainly, no. That’s the idea of “good enough” x86 performance. Will you notice the difference in gaming performance illustrated last week, though? When it means the difference between playable frame rates at 1920x1080 or choppiness, then yes.
That doesn’t make the next chart any easier to swallow, though.

In watt-hours, an overclocked A10-5800K uses almost twice as much power as a Core i3-3225 to complete the same workloads. Enthusiasts in AMD’s camp are going to look at those numbers and claim they don’t care about a marginally-higher power bill (the light bulbs on either side of your garage, together, probably use as much power), so long as they get usable 3D performance, while the cool-and-quiet crowd will remind us that a 100 W APU requires more cooling. That could mean a faster-spinning fan or a larger heat sink. Either way, that piece of logic that shifts balance from x86 performance to graphics alacrity is going to cost you.
- 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.