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.



This pretty much seals the deal as far as we're concerned. True, it could be down to the motherboard and memory differences rather than CPU itself, but both the MSI AM2+ and Gigabyte AM3 boards are enthusiast class with plenty of features so at the wall this is the price you pay and the cost of running is higher with DDR3 memory. At idle, it's a solid 10W for every CPU and under load it's also higher by several watts as well (especially for the quad-cores).

Comparatively, AMD has an energy efficient setup compared to Intel's Core 2 Quads in particular for the most part or, at least competitive in the price-performance stakes. The triple-cores don't drop the power level that much, but a single core is less of an impact when there's a large L3 cache to feed as well.