Power Consumption and temperatures

Before we start our physical testing let me state that we'll be using the new Phenom II X6 1055T and 1090T processors today in the review. That means in the benchmarks there will be very little to compare at baseline level. But for overclocking you'll notice some pretty interesting results alright. Let's start off with the motherboard / Phenom II X6 combo in power consumption and temperatures first though.

Power Consumption and temperatures

So the new Phenom II X6 processors have a 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 (obviously) 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 peaks out at roughly 185 Watts power consumption when we stress the six CPU cores. Our system idles merely 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).

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. By the way, all the 890FX entries are the Crosshair IV Forumula.

Let's put the PC 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 manage to keep really acceptable temperatures, below 45 Degrees C based on a 35 USD Heatpipe based CPU cooler.  Let's go to the next page and see where we end up with our overclock.