AMD Phenom II X3 720 BE and Phenom II X4 810 Processors

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. All of the systems used identical hardware minus the motherboard and processor. It should be noted that the Core i7 processors used a Thermaltake BigWater 760i water cooler and the rest of the systems used a Corsair Nautilus 500 water cooler.

Results: When it came to power consumption the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200S uses 30W less power at load than the AMD Phenom II X4 810 processor that it is priced against. The AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition wasn’t really more energy efficient that the Phenom II X4 810 since it has more cache and a higher clock frequency. At an idle state all the Phenom II processors that we have looked at have roughly the same idle speed, so nothing significant to report back on that as they all have 45nm Deneb cores inside.