Power Dissipation - No Reliable Data
In order to measure their power consumption, we put the three Phenom models under a high load by using the multi-threaded version of Prime95, which stresses all cores of a CPU. We measured the power consumption on boards made by Asus, MSI and Gigabyte based on AMD's 790FX chipset. Our measurements fluctuated between 43.9 Watts and 23.3 Watts when idle. Since our Phenom processor is still an engineering sample and the BIOS versions of the motherboards we used were still BETA versions, we assume that Cool'n'Quiet 2.0 is not fully supported yet. This is supported by the fact that we received different results on the Gigabyte board using the BIOS versions F2e,F2h, and F2i. Under these circumstances, our results, especially the idle measurements, can thus not be considered reliableyet, since the boards still lack full support for the power saving functionality.
