Power Consumption

The new AM3 Athlon II X3 processor announced today has a fairly high TDP (peak wattage), this is 95W. Let's monitor what we get returned in full PC power consumption with the system in IDLE and with all the CPU cores stressed.

We notice our test platform peak out at roughly 160 Watts power consumption when we stress the CPU cores. Our system however idles merely at 107 Watts.

An important remark by the way; we added a dedicated graphics card (GTX 280), you'll notice that the end-result overall in idle and peak wattage is very impressive. If we'd have removed the dedicated GPU and went for the embedded graphics solution of the motherboard you could easily shave off another 50 Watts of power consumption, as that's roughly what a high-end graphics card consumes in an idle state.

Overall this is decent power consumption, remember this is a quad core processor. Mind you also that for benchmarking purposes we have energy saving features disabled. So when enabled, power consumption in IDLE would be even lower.

Temperatures

We did not have time to overclock just yet as the sample arrived shortly before release. But we did manage to stress it really well. Temperatures are almost sick, that low:

• Idle temperature is 20 Degrees C / 68 F
• Full 4 core LOAD is 28 Degrees C / 82 F

As you can see these are just really respectable numbers. We're curious is there's an offset (other reviews will tell). During our load-test we did place our finger on the copper heat sink base block, and it definitely was below body temperature.

We used an OCZ Vendetta 2 heatpipe cooler.