The new Phenom II processors have a pretty okay TDP (peak wattage) compared to the last flagship products, Phenom X4 9950 at 140W. The new Phenom II X4 920 and 940 processors have a TDP of 125 Watt (125 Watt peak, when all 4 cores in the processor are 100% utilized and stressed).

Much like the last-gen products, we have four active & independent cores here. Each core can be clocked down independently if not utilized, saving heaps of current. If the processors are temporarily inactive, they can pretty much put themselves in sleep-mode (clocking down). Hyper Transport will power down and a low-power stage is activated on the memory.

AMD's Cool'n'Quiet technology has been updated to revision 3.0 and provides even better power management. Keywords here are improved power tuning with additional performance states, and up to 50% less power at idle compared to Cool'n‘Quiet 2.0. As AMD likes to say: "AMD Phenom II processors give you performance when you need it and save power when you don‘t".

As a result we notice our test platform peak out at 189 Watts power consumption when we stress the 4 CPU cores, yet idles merely at 89 Watts (integrated graphics processor used, not a dedicated one). We'll show you some more numbers after our benchmark sessions though, but it's definitely looking really good.

Example: a Gigabyte 790GX based AM2+ motherboard with the Phenom II X4 940 and no dedicated graphics card installed (using integrated GPU), will idle at 89 Watt (power management activated, CPU throttles down).

If we take that same configuration, yet now we stress the four CPU cores with Prime95 (stress test), our power consumption maxes out at 189 Watts. Once we add a graphics card to this configuration we still see a very respectable 208 Watts power consumption with four CPU cores stressed (GPU in idle).

So, the CPU stressed shows fairly normal power consumption, and clocked down when idling it's actually pretty good.