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 was run on all cores to make sure each and every processor was at 100% load. Both processors were tested on a system using identical hardware.

Results: The power supply that we have dedicated to just our CPU testing systems recently failed and is no longer in production. Since we had to the change power supply all the power consumption results of the processors will have to be re-tested. For the time being we ran power consumption tests on some of the AMD Phenom II processors to see how the two new comers do. The AMD Athlon II X2 250 uses the least amount of power, which makes sense as it is a dual-core part with just 2MB of L2 cache. The Phenom II X2 550 and Phenom II X3 720 both consume roughly the same amount of power and both do contain 6MB of L3 cache. Expecting the AMD Phenom II X2 550 to consume less power than the triple-core Phenom X3 720 we contacted AMD and showed them this chart. They responded by saying this:

"You likely have a very cool-running X3 in your hands.  Remember, we spec the max spec... but CPUs can run under that max spec... so there can be variation.  So if you got one of the hotter running X2s that got closer to it's max TDP and a very cool-running X3, you could easily explain the numbers you're seeing." AMD PR