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

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AMD’s six-core CPU is affordable (at least, compared to Intel's Core i7-980X). We're overclocking the Thuban design to see if its efficiency improves from faster clock rates. Comparisons to other quad- and hexa-core processors provide some perspective.

Single-Thread Efficiency

Our efficiency workload consists of most of the benchmarks you found on the test setup page. We split into single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads to get a better look at what you’ll see in real life if you decide to overclock your Phenom II X6. This single-threaded section includes Adobe Acrobat, iTunes, Lame, and WinZip.

It’s interesting to see that the total power used to complete the full single-threaded workload is actually lower on the overclocked processors. Performance and power consumption scale linearly, as you can see by total power used being identical on all three overclocks.