AMD Phenom II X4 955 Processor Review

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 change power supply numbers all of the processors will have to be re-tested. For the time being we ran power consumption tests on the AMD Phenom II 955 versus the AMD Phenom II X3 720. This is an interesting comparison since one is a quad-core processor and the other is a triple-core. Notice the idle power consumption is roughly the same, but the quad-core uses 43W more under full CPU load. This is one of the reasons that the triple-core processors are rated at 95W TDP, while the quad-cores are rated at 125W TDP.