AMD Launches New Phenom II and Athlon II Processors
Total System Power Consumption
We'd like to cover a few final data points before bringing this article to a close. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test systems consumed using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while 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 processors alone.
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As was the case in the rest of our testing, the results from our power consumption tests were as expected. The higher-clocked chips in each product family consumed slightly more power than their lower-clocked counterparts; no surprises there. Now that both AMD and Intel have made significantly strides in terms of power consumption over the CPU architectures of yesteryear, what's more interesting than the total power consumption of each platform---at least to us--is how little power (relatively speaking) they use in the grand scheme of things. The fact that a powerful six-core system with a discrete GPU and 4GB of RAM consumes only marginally more power under full load than a couple of 100W light bulbs is just plain impressive.
