Power Consumption

When we test power consumption, we consider it as a whole platform so whether the CPU includes a memory controller or it's separate on the northbridge doesn't make a difference to what we measure at the wall and how much electricity is paid for. As always, we tested with all the power saving features enabled on the CPUs specifically.

While it's difficult to compare the motherboards in an apples to apples scenario, none of the motherboards used feature specific power regulation for the CPU phases and all of them are performance parts from DFI, Intel, MSI or Gigabyte.



Despite the fact the Phenom IIs clock down quite a long way to just 800MHz when idling, these power numbers are somewhat disappointing. The 940, with DDR2 and a DDR2 motherboard, are a good 17W lower power than the 945/955 CPUs and even 5W more power hungry than the other AM3 CPUs as well under idle conditions.

Under load and the Phenom II X4 945 and 955 consume more power than even the Core i7-920 with its extra DDR3 DIMM as it sits in the realm of the older 65nm Intel quad cores. Clock for clock, there's nearly a 30W difference between DDR3 setup over DDR2.