It's interesting to note the power consumption across all motherboards because energy results can fluctuate between manufacturers due to the features and specifications that are integrated. First of all, for the idle tests the system is cold booted into Windows and no additional applications are executed - the watts are noted on the external energy monitor we use. Then the system is loaded with LinX 0.6.4 and MSI Kombustor simultainiously - watts are again monitored throughout the period of testing and the highest rated watts are then noted down. Below are the results of this energy test.
Using a SSD alone over traditional HDDs prove to lower system power usage by around 10-20W, however, the peak power consumption was surprisingly high from the A10-6800K. Even though this test measures the 'peak system power draw' under unrealistic loads, the peak was around 20w higher than the A8-5600K (and the A10-5800K using a HDD!) these variations could be down to differences in the Turbo Core and new voltage management. On the GPU OC testing, the peak power draw, comparatively, increased by a marginal 7W. Overclocking the CPU and GPU often tends to use a much larger power draw but because we just overclocked the GPU, combined with the higher stock CPU speeds, we may be able to achieve close to the full potential of the APU performance without wasting more power needlessly.
