AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

Power Consumption

We are not sure if our sporadic issues with AMD's Cool'n'Quiet feature are due to the motherboard vendor or the AMD processor itself but for the Phenom II X2 555 BE and our MSI 790FX-GD70 motherboard (with latest version 1.8 BIOS), this feature did not appear to work as our processor stayed constantly at its rated frequency of 3.2GHz despite having Cool'n'Quiet and hardware C1E enabled in the BIOS.

For this reason, the Phenom II X2 555 BE had slightly higher power consumption at idle despite its two cores. This situation improved somewhat once we started to load the system but compared to Intel's processors, the Phenom II X2 series are not the most energy efficient processors.

Overclocking

Without too much effort, we could get our Phenom II X2 555 BE to 3.9GHz. Voltage was mildly increased by a couple of steps to around 1.4V. Despite the clock speed increase, the frame rates in Crysis only went up by around five and the Phenom II X2 555 remained behind the quad-cores, which proved that Crysis indeed utilizes more than the usual two cores. That aside, you can take a guess how much more power hungry the processor is in this overclocking state; this has never been a shining area for AMD unfortunately.

We managed to push it to 3.9GHz air-cooled without too much tweaking involved.



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