AMD Phenom X4 9850 B3 Revision
Before we bring this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test systems were consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the motherboards alone.
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Our power consumption testing yielded some interesting results. First off, we found that a B2 revision Phenom actually consumed more power with the TLB patch enabled, then it did disabled. Even though a large part of the chip is essentially going unused with the patch, the processor still managed to use more power. If we shift focus to the B3 revision Phenom X4 9850, you'll see the chip consumed less power than B2 while idling, but a bit more while under load. We suspect this is due to the Phenom X4 9850's faster memory controller and HT link and the relative newness of B3 silicon. Over time, we suspect power consumption to drop as AMD tweaks their manufacturing process.
