Power Consumption

For all of the performance tests on the previous few pages, we disable all power saving technology in order to give us a consistent set of results, and also to obtain best-case performance numbers - technologies such as Intel's SpeedStep might only take microseconds to kick in, but that can make all the difference in some tests. However, for the power consumption tests we re-enable everything but Intel's Turbo Boost in order to get a real-world power draw.

Idle Power Consumption

For this test, we leave the PC doing nothing but displaying the Windows Vista desktop (with Aero enabled) for a few minutes and record the wattage drawn from the wall via a power meter.

Full Load Power Consumption

For this test, we run the small FFT test of Prime95 (v25.9) across all available processing threads and record the wattage drawn from the wall via a power meter.


Again the Intel platforms undercut the AMDs in terms of low power use - with the Intel E7400 a good 8W lower than the bunch of AMD chips, and when loaded there's a clear 26W difference. It's worth noting that the limitation of these comparatives is that this is whole platform is under the scope - not just the CPU alone - so the different motherboard and DDR2/3 difference will also make a slight difference.

Final Thoughts

The Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition is what the Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition should have been. In fact, there's very little reason to buy an old K8, or even K10 cored CPU now the Athlon II X2 250 and Phenom II X2 550 are available (unless, that is, you have a specific need for an ultra low power 45W 5050e).

The Phenom II X2 offers plenty of performance and potential for simple and advanced overclocking for enthusiasts to have fun with. It's a solid chip for gaming and is excellent for multitasking. It suffers in comparison to the Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 when both are overclocked and you're throwing video encoding or image editing tasks their way, but that's not to say the X2 550 BE doesn't give the Intel CPU a good run for its money - if only it could roll over the 4GHz barrier!

If you're not into overclocking though, but fancy a fast machine for the family or friends, with the possibility of future upgrades; the 3.1GHz core clock affords a solid performance and the AM3 socket also has a bit of a future. It may not excel in very heavy workload - that's what quad cores are for - but for a basic all rounder, the Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition is certainly a good buy, and it's helped by the fact it's cheaper than comparable Intel chips, especially when you factor in platform costs.

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

Score Guide