More AMD Brazos Motherboards - ASUS and Sapphire Tested!
HD Playback Performance & Power Consumption
HD Playback Performance
When it comes to playing a Blu-ray disc on these Brazos systems, there are no issues like lag or artifacts. CPU utilization was relatively low since hardware acceleration is supported and the GPU component of the Zacate APU is the one doing the heavy lifting here. We saw some fluctuation among the numbers for the ASUS and Sapphire, but even then, the highest we saw was 25% CPU usage, which is comfortably within our tolerance.
Power Consumption
Power consumption for the ASUS was a bit higher than the other boards; the larger microATX form factor and its features probably accounted for this. Besides that, the Sapphire was in line with the other Brazos boards, which in this case meant a maximum draw of just 63W at peak. Such relatively low power consumption is undoubtedly one of the strong points about this platform, making it suited for less demanding tasks like browsing the internet, media consumption and light productivity workloads.