Power Consumption

Power Consumption

Since power consumption is a big deal these days, we ran some simple power consumption tests on our test beds. The systems ran with the power supplies, case fan, video card and hard drive model. To measure idle usage, we ran the system at idle for one hour on the desktop with no screen saver and took the measurement. For load measurements, POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 23 was run on all cores to make sure each and every processor was at 100% load. All of the systems used identical hardware minus the motherboard and processor.

Results: When it comes to power consumption the 140W Phenom 9900 likes to consume a lot of energy At full load it topped the charts at 345W and at idle it ran 197W with Cool'N'Quiet enabled and 243W if it was disabled.  The new Intel QX9770 for example is has a higher clock frequency and more cache, but runs nearly 100W lower at idle. Keep in mind that the Phenom 9500 and 9600 will be 95W parts, but we didn't get to test those.