Power-draw and overclocking
| Power consumption - idle | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD Phenom II X4 940 BE | AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE | Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 | Intel Core i7 920 | Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 | Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 | Phenom II X4 810 | AMD Phenom II X4 920 |
| 123 | 126 | 129 | 160 | 125 | 115 | 122 | 120 |
Idle and load power-draw is measured at the mains, via a watt-meter.
The idle figure represents the system simply running Vista with no other load imposed, and the horde of processors have their respective energy-saving technologies - Cool 'n' Quiet and EIST - turned on.
The Gigabyte motherboard used for the Core i7 has more bells and whistles than we'd care to list, helping to push up the idle power-draw. The Phenom II X4 955 BE's performance is consistent with all others'.
| Power consumption - load (2D) | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD Phenom II X4 940 BE | AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE | Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 | Intel Core i7 920 | Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 | Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 | Phenom II X4 810 | AMD Phenom II X4 920 |
| 201 | 206 | 177 | 256 | 180 | 155 | 176 | 195 |
Load is defined as running wPrime 1024m calculation which stresses all the cores.
Intel Core i7 is the power-hungriest of the lot, no question, but the Core 2 Quads have a consistent advantage over the AMD chips. It's worth bearing in mind that the figures are quoted for the system rather than the chips, and the ASUS AM3 790FX motherboard is more feature-laden than the Foxconn P45A-S the Intel Core 2 Quads are tested upon.
Overclocking
Cranking her up by bumping up voltage to a relatively safe 1.45V with better-than-reference air-cooling we hit 3.7GHz without too much difficulty. Increasing the voltage to 1.55V pushed up the stable clock to 3.8GHz, but running at 4GHz, on our sample at least, wasn't possible without resorting to some meatier cooling.
