Power Consumption and temperatures

Power Consumption and temperatures

The newer AM3 Phenom II X4 processors have a pretty good TDP (peak wattage), compared to the last flagship products they shaved off 20 watts while increasing performance. For this review we used and tested the motherboard with the Phenom II X4 965BE (125W revision) processor that has a TDP of 125 Watts (= 125W peak, when all 4 cores in the processor are 100% utilized and stressed).
Much like the last-gen products, we have four active and independent cores here. Each core can be clocked down independently if not utilized, saving heaps of current. If the cores are temporarily inactive, they can pretty much put themselves in sleep-mode (clocking down). Hyper Transport will power down and a low-power stage is activated on the memory.

AMD's Cool'n'Quiet technology was recently updated to revision 3.0 and provides even better power management. Keywords here are improved power tuning with additional performance states, and up to 50% less power at idle compared to Cool'n'Quiet 2.0

As a result we notice our test platform peaks out at roughly 180 Watts power consumption when we stress the CPU cores. Our system however idles merely at 129 Watts (dedicated graphics card used, not an integrated one).

We used the MSI 785G based AM3 motherboard and added a dedicated graphics card (Radeon HD 5870), you'll notice that the end-result overall in idle and peak wattage is very impressive. As you can see once we stress four CPU cores with Prime95 (stress test), our power consumption maxes out at roughly 165 Watts. .

Here we you are looking at a CPU stress test. Processor temperatures while 100% utilized remain below 45 Degrees C / 113 F.