AMD Athlon II X4 620 review - Power Consumption and temperatures

Power Consumption

The new AM3 Athlon II X4 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 the four CPU cores stressed.

We notice our test platform peak out at roughly 165 Watts power consumption when we stress the CPU cores. Our system however idles merely at 111 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.

Temperatures

We did not have time to overclock just yet as the 620 sample arrived shortly before release. But we did manage to stress it really well. Temperatures are really nice:

• Idle temperature is 22 Degrees C / 70 F
• Full 4 core LOAD is 42 Degrees C / 106 F

As you can see these are just really respectable numbers.