Power Consumption and Temperatures

Power Consumption and Temperatures

The Phenom II processor tested today still has that respectable TDP (peak wattage) of 125 Watts.

Today's setup uses the motherboard on which we seated a dedicated graphics card (GeForce GTX 580), 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 just under 200 Watts.

Our system idles merely at roughly 117 Watts depending on the OS energy saving setting. This is a complete PC with a high-end graphics card inserted (but GPU not stressed).

BTW bear in mind that these tests are all very motherboard dependant and results can (and will) vary per PC setup.

The motherboard demands a little more power though that can be tweaked in the BIOS as you'll get several power state options.

• We average out at roughly 117W idle (with a GeForce GTX 580 - 8GB Memory and one SSD installed). And once we stress the CPU cores overall power consumption went up towards 195W

The slightly higher wattage compared to reference products can be explained due to the use of extra chips on motherboards, like the USB 3.0 controllers, Hydra IC, PLX switch chip, extra SATA controllers, VIA HUB ands so on. This differs per motherboard.

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 X4 980 with its four cores stressed under Prime95 software only reached 42 Degrees C / 111 F on the CPU temperature and the individual cores peak to roughly 50 C. Let's go the next page and see where we end with our overclock.