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. In addition, we reset the BIOS and enabled fail safe defaults.

In addition, we made sure that both AMD Cool'n'Quiet and Intel EIST/C1E power saving technologies were enabled. AMD's "Turbo mode" was left enabled and we tested both yellow and red to show the difference in power consumption on the Phenom X3 8750.



We saw similar differences between red and yellow modes on the Phenom X3 8750 as we did on the quad-core Phenoms we looked at earlier in the month. While upper-end power consumption wasn’t reduced, there were some decent idle power savings recorded (over 10 percent, in fact), which will no doubt be of interest to those that leave their machines idling for prolonged periods of time.

What’s more, there are some power savings over the quad-core Phenom and Core 2 Quad processors, but all of Intel’s dual-core processors consume less power at both idle and load. When you factor in performance as well, this means that the Phenom X3 8750 isn’t exactly the most power-efficient processor on the market.