Power consumption and overclocking
We've activated the energy-saving features within the respective boards' BIOSes for the idle power-draw test. It's good to know we're seeing laptop-like figures.
Even pushing the chips by loading the CPU and GPU segments doesn't bring us close to a 100W at-wall rating. Needless to say, the ASUS board is also competitive here.
Overclocking
The basic overclocking test increases CPU and chipset voltage by 10 per cent, drop the memory-multiplier to DDR3-800, and then sets out to achieve the highest stable frequency from the A8-3850 chip. Here's what we got to:
You can take a couple of points from here. First off, the A8-3850 is a reasonable overclocker with respect to the CPU. Secondly, our trio of boards - we added in a Gigabyte, too - provide similar overclocking potential. That said, the ASUS scores a minor win here.