Power Consumption

For our power consumption testing, we used the same Corsair XMS2 8500C5 Dominator memory and Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra in both AMD and Intel systems to maintain consistency.

This also helped to eliminate any chance of differences in power consumption between components - something that we've certainly experienced in the past.

We removed all additional cooling fans with only the CPU cooler left plugged in, while we also reset the BIOS and enabled fail safe defaults.

Finally, we made sure that both AMD Cool'n'Quiet and Intel EIST/C1E power saving technologies were tested enabled and disabled.






As expected, the Phenom X4 9350e uses less power better than every other quad-core we've seen, although the X3 8750 isn't hugely far off - with CnQ enabled it's just 5W more at idle and 20W more at load while also having several hundred more MHz core clock and a fantastic overhead for overclocking. With Cool'n'Quiet disabled, the power consumption again goes up but to a greater degree on the X3 8750. Overall though, there's a significant power saving by 50, 60, and even 70W compared to the other Phenoms. It's not that much more than some of the dual-core chips - both the E8400/8500 (for example) are rated at a 65W TDP - but the whole system is respectively lower power.