Power Consumption and Temperatures
Power Consumption and Temperatures
The two Phenom II processors tested today both have a respectable TDP (peak wattage) of 125 Watts, the Propus based Athlon II X4 processors have a TDP of 95 Watts.
Today's setup uses the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula motherboard on which we seated a dedicated graphics card (Radeon HD 5870), you'll notice that the end-result overall for idle and peak wattage remains good.
Have a look below to see how we measure and traumatize the processor. As you can see, once we stress all four CPU cores with Prime95 (stress test), our power consumption maxes out at 152 Watts for the Athlon II X4 645 and 175 Watts for the Phenom II X4 970.
We notice our test platform peak out at roughly 185 Watts power consumption when we stress the six CPU cores of the Phenom II X6 1075T. Our system idles merely at roughly 100 Watts depending on the OS energy saving setting. This is a complete PC with a high-end graphics card inserted (but GPU not stressed).
CPU + R5870 | IDLE (Balanced) | Idle (High perf) | 100% CPU |
890FX + Athlon II X4 645 | 73 | 88 | 152 |
890GX + X4 965 | 75 | 96 | 164 |
890FX + X4 970 | 81 | 92 | 175 |
890FX + X6 1055T | 85 | 104 | 183 |
890FX + X6 1075T | 87 | 109 | 182 |
890FX + X6 1095T | 87 | 107 | 187 |
H55 +Core i7 870 | 115 | 170 | 218 |
X58 + Core i7 980X | 139 | 150 | 272 |
When we place a couple of platforms in a chart and look at peak power consumption, we see the 890FX + Phenom II X6 1075T push onwards to 182 Watts when fully stressed, not bad really. Let's put the processor under heavy load and see how temperatures behave as well. BTW bear in mind that these tests are all very motherboard dependant and results can (and will) vary per PC.
Processor temperatures while idle remain below 30 Degrees C / 86 F based on air cooling for all three processors. We are cooling the processors with an OCZ Vendetta heatpipe based cooler only.
Peak temperatures remain really good as well, the temperatures of the Phenom II X6 1075T processor are just phenomenal at under 45 Degrees C. The same can be said for the X4 970 with nearly the same temperatures. This one with four cores stressed under Prime95 software only reached 43 Degrees C, similar to the Athlon II X4 645.
Let's go the next page and see where we end with our overclock.