Power Consumption and temperatures

Power Consumption and temperatures

Before we start our physical testing, let me state that we'll be using the new Phenom II X6 1090T processor 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 a dedicated graphics card (Radeon HD 5870), you'll notice that the end-result overall in idle and peak wattage remains good.

We notice our test platform peaks out at roughly 176 Watts power consumption when we stress the six CPU cores. Our system idles at merely roughly 75 Watts depending on the OS energy saving setting. This is a complete PC with a high-end graphics card inserted (but GPU not stressed).

Apparently this chipset is a little more energy friendly. Let's put the PC under heavy load and see how temperatures behave.

Here you are looking at a CPU stress test. Processor temperatures while 100% utilized remain at roughly 43 Degrees C / 109 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. These results are 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.