Published in Reviews

AMD Phenom II Energy Efficient CPUs tested

by on15 July 2009

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Review: Efficiency pays off


The new Phenom II CPUs are quite a success for AMD. While the 955 Black Edition is the most famous CPUs on our price search engine with the Q9550 close behind, the only concern some users and we have is the high energy consumption. Meanwhile AMD has released two energy efficient CPUs to counter Intel on real world power consumption. Today we will check out if AMD succeed in making truly power efficient processors once again. 

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Both CPUs, the 705e and 905e are the same as their "bigger" brothers. Both are clocked with 2.5GHz, have 3x respectively 4x 256kB L2 cache and 6MB shared L3 cache. The only major difference is the VCore. While the triple-core comes with 1.175V the quad-core manages 1.15V. This means AMD has matched the VCores used on Intel CPUs.   

The TDP is now rated 65W, which is lower compared to Intel. But AMD does always use much more power and Intels TDP ratings are way too high for E- and Q-series.


Testbed:

Motherboard:
MSI 790GX-GD70 (provided by MSI)
AMD 790GX/SB750
MSI DKA790GX (provided by MSI)
AMD 790GX/SB750
ECS Elitegroup A790GXM-AD3 (provided by Elitegroup)

AMD 790GX/SB750
Intel DX58SO "Smackover" (provided by Intel)
Intel X58/iCH10R

CPU:
AMD Phenom II 705e (provided by AMD)
AMD Phenom II 905e (provided by AMD)
AMD Phenom II 720 Black Edition (provided by AMD)
AMD Phenom II 810 (provided by AMD)
AMD Phenom II 955 Black Edition (provided by AMD)
Intel E7200 (provided by K&M Elektronik)
Intel E8400 (provided by Intel)
Intel Q9450 (provided by Intel)
Intel QX9650  (provided by Intel)
Intel Core i7 920  (provided by Intel)
Intel Core i7 975XE  (provided by Intel)


CPU-Cooler:
Scythe Kabuto (provided by Scythe-Europe) for AMD and Intel E/Q
Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme 1366 (provided by Thermalright) for Intel i7

Memory:
Kingston 2GB Kit PC2-9600U KHX1200D2K2/2G (provided by Kingston)
1066MHz CL5-5-5-15 CR2T at 1.90V for AMD DDR2
Qimonda 3GB Kit PC3-8500U (provided by Qimonda)
1066MHz CL7-7-7-20 CR1T at 1.55V for Intel i7
Kingston 3GB Kit PC3-10600U KHX1600D3K3/2GX (provided by Kingston)
1333MHz CL7-7-7-20 CR1T at 1.50V for AMD DDR3

Graphics Card:
MSI R4850-2D1G-OC (provided by MSI)

Power supply:
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 500W (provided by PC Power & Cooling)

Hard disk:
Western Digital WD4000KD (provided by Ditech)

Case fans:
SilenX iXtrema Pro 14dB(A) (provided by PC-Cooling.at)
Scythe DFS122512LS

Case:
Cooler Master Stacker 831 Lite (provided by Cooler Master)

OS:
Since we are still not fans of Vista, all tests are performed with XP SP3. As 64-bit software is still not very common, we stick with the 32-bit version.




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Last modified on 15 July 2009
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