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 logical CPU cores with Prime95 (stress test).

The motherboard demands a little more power though that can be tweaked in the BIOS, as you'll get several power state options. We choose a normal power state, and 'balanced' in Windows 7 energy management.

And above we stress the processor on all active cores and threads, we leave the GPU in idle. This would be your peak desktop power consumption.

Higher wattages in-between the same chipset based motherboards can be explained due to the use of many extra chips, like the extra USB 3.0 controllers, Hydra IC, PLX switch chips, extra SATA controllers, USB HUB and so on. So this is an indication of what can differ per motherboard type.

We are cooling the processor with an OCZ Vendetta heatpipe based cooler only and have Cool and Quiet activated.

Peak temperatures remain decent as well, the Phenom II X4 980 with its four cores stressed under Prime95 software. Again, Cool and Quiet is enabled where the FAN RPM is set as low as possible.