For today's tests we'll be using the new AM3 Phenom II X3 720BE processor, which has a pretty good TDP (peak wattage) compared to the last flagship products, 95 Watts (95 Watts peak, when all 4 cores in the processor are 100% utilized and stressed).

In combo with the AMD 790 chipset each processor 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 state 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 a result we notice our test platform peaked at roughly 170 Watts power consumption when we stress the CPU cores. Our system however idles at merely 80 to 90 Watts (integrated graphics processor used, not a dedicated one).

So the PC in idle with integrated graphics being used, utilized roughly 80-90 Watts. If we select Vista 'balanced' (energy aware mode) that number even drops to 68 Watts. We always measure in Windows Vista high-performance mode though. Once we stressed all CPU cores that number rose to 127 Watts (pretty low really).

Once we add a dedicated graphics card (GeForce GTX 280) we can add another 50 Watts for the GPU alone. When we load up the CPU's cores, have the dedicated graphics card installed AND overclock to 3600 MHz we see the system pull 215 Watts from the wall socket.

Really that's pretty good. Mind you that while a dedicated graphics card was installed, it was not utilized. We only stressed the CPU cores here.

Speaking of that majestic topic called overclocking, let's have a look at that.