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, or MSI.


The AMD Phenom II CPUs really clock down when they go into idle - from 2.8GHz and 3GHz to just 800MHz on a 4x multiplier! Not that when idle it needs many MHz to do much, but we found our MSI 790GX motherboard was rather flaky with Cool'n'Quiet enabled and often crashed when suddenly loading the CPU - is this just because of an early BIOS, or are the CPU power requirements for the sudden 2.2GHz clock increase causing problems?

When it does work though, it's super low power - even less than the 45nm Core 2 Quads, which is great news!


The load power is still higher than the Intel Core 2 Quads, but not by much, and compared to the Core i7s which also contain several MB of L3 cache and a memory controller, the Phenom IIs use far less power, but at the same time they also do less work too.