Efficiency: Optimizing The Clock Rate Of AMD's Phenom II X6

Power Consumption

Our power consumption results are different from those that Chris measured in his Phenom II X6 review because the platforms and graphics cards are different.

Overclocking the Phenom II X6 1090T doesn’t significantly impact idle power, as Cool’n’Quiet remains active and throttles CPU clock speed (and voltage) down to 800 MHz where possible. All test systems show idle power readings of 80W to 90W, which is good given that we’re looking at the fastest system configurations available today. This applies to our system running Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5850 cards. Faster models typically increase idle power.

We were afraid that heavy overclocking would result in skyrocketing peak power consumption, but this is only the case if you go for serious overclocks and voltage increases. These results will vary quite a bit with the platform you use, as well as with power supply efficiency. Chris got lower power numbers for his Intel systems, for example. Let’s look at the resulting power efficiency to draw conclusions.