Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT (A85X) Motherboard Review

Power Consumption

To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the system takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment.

The Sapphire A85XT when looking at power draw was the lowest idle power draw across the rest of the A85X boards, with only the A55 Asus board beating it by 1 watt. The load wattage was the second lowest, with the MSI just beating it, but its worth noting that the MSI has a lesser specced APU; the A8-5600k.

Though we had to ramp the voltage up to produce our overclock, the wattages only increased slightly to 64 watts idle and 266 watts load.