Efficiency: Optimizing The Clock Rate Of AMD's Phenom II X6
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.
Overall Efficiency
Our overclocking up to a 3.8 GHz base clock reduces the time required to complete our overall workload, but not significantly.
Total power used is best at only 3.4 GHz, the smallest overclock. Let’s look at what this means for efficiency.
This diagram shows power consumption throughout the workload for all of the processors tested here.
The second diagram shows only our different overclocks. You can see power peaks as well as total duration.
If we relate performance (total runtime) to total power requirement in watt-hours, we find that the 3.4 GHz setting delivers the best performance per watt. Even at 3.6 GHz, you’ll get more performance for the power investment than at the 3.2 GHz stock speed. Therefore it makes sense to run your Phenom II X6 1090T at 3.4 or 3.6 GHz for the sake of maximizing efficiency.
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