Power Consumption and temperatures

Power Consumption and temperatures

The new Phenom II X6 processors have an respectable TDP (peak wattage) at 125 Watt, that's roughly similar to the most high-end (C3 revision) AMD Phenom II 965 quad-core processor, yet now the Phenom II X6 has two more cores while retaining that TDP. Let's build a system and see how that translates towards real-world power consumption.

Today's setup uses the ASUS Crosshair IV formula motherboard on which we added a dedicated graphics card (Radeon HD 5870), you'll notice that the end-result overall in 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 187 Watts.

As a result we notice our test platform peak out at roughly 185 Watts power consumption when we stress the six CPU cores. Our system idles merely roughly 100 Watts depending ion the OS energy saving setting. This is a complete PC with a high-end graphics card inserted (but GPU not stressed).

When we place a couple of platforms in a chart and look at peak power consumption, we see the 890FX + Phenom II X6 1095T push onwards to 190 Watt when fully stressed, not bad really.

Let's put the processor under heavy load and see how temperatures behave as well.

Here you are looking at a CPU stress test. Processor temperatures while 100% utilized remain below 30 Degrees C / 86 F. We are cooling the processor with an OCZ Vendetta heatpipe based cooler only.

This is one other thing we really have to complement AMD on, the temperatures of the Phenom II X6 processors are just phenomenal. Even overclocked (over 4 GHz) we keep really acceptable temperatures below 45 Degrees C based on a 25 USD Heatpipe based CPU cooler.  Let's go the next page and see where we end with our overclock.