General Hands-On Usage

 

Here's a CPU-Z screenshot showing some detailed specs of what's running under the FX6803's hood:

 

 

And here's a GPU-Z screenshot showing the status for the graphics card.

 

 

This system skews towards the low-end of what we consider a "mid-range" gaming box, and it shows in terms of day-to-day performance. Once the machine is up and running, it performs fine in general tasks such as browsing the Internet or editing an Excel spreadsheet, although it doesn't have the same zip as the Solid-State Drive (SSD) equipped PCs we've been seeing lately.

 

But what's most noticeable is the system's extremely long boot time. Even without an anti-virus program running, the FX6803 takes more than twice as long to boot as other recent machines, including even some of the low-voltage net-tops we've reviewed, such as the Atom-powered ZOTAC ZBOX Blu-ray Mini-HTPC.

 

 

Upon reaching the desktop (finally), we're met with a splash screen prompting us to activate Norton Internet Sercurity.

 

Boot Time

 

 

The system took an excruciatingly long 145 seconds to boot to the Windows desktop, which is way longer than it should, given the hardware inside.

 

Power Consumption

 

The FX6803 consumes 107 watts of power at idle, hopping up to 226 watts under load.

 

 

 

Audio Performance

 

We ran this custom rig through the standard media encoding test regime here at TweakTown, which includes music and video transcoding.

 

All systems are tested "as is", which means operating systems and drivers can and do vary and some come pre-installed with applications that may or may not affect performance.

 

Any anti-virus or security applications are disabled and uninstalled before any testing is started, as they can affect test numbers.

 

For the iTunes encoding test we took the White Stripes - Under Great White Northern Lights album in MP3 format and encode it to AAC format using iTunes and time the results with a stopwatch.

 

 

The computer performed this task in 75 seconds, the longest time we've seen on recent desktop machines.

 

Video Performance

 

For the movie-encoding test, we took the Microsoft Magic of Flight VC-1 WMV (1080p HD) video with six-channel audio and transcode it to XviD (1080p HD) with LAME MP3 two-channel audio and an MP4 container using MediaCoder 0.7.3.4616 32-bit edition.

 

The machine took 90 seconds to complete this task, which is more on par with what we'd expect from an i7 930 processor.