*Navigate:* Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home	.	.
*Prices:* Mainboards ABIT ASUS Chaintech Shuttle Soyo Tyan CPU Intel P4 2.4C-800 P4 2.6C-800 P4 2.8C-800 P4 3.0-800 P4 3.2-800 AMD AthlonXP XP 1700+ XP 2000+ XP 2400+ XP 2500+ XP 2700+ XP 3000+ XP 3200+ Athlon64 Athlon64 3200+ Athlon64 FX-51 Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ Search Prices:

What are you
shopping for?

LOSTCIRCUITS

SHORTCUTS:

A new Platform
Quad-FX Idiosyncrasies
The Motherboard
Test Config, Benchmark Overview
Memory Performance
The 64-bit Question
Idle Power by OS
Max Power
Render Power (Cinebench)
trueSpace
POV-Ray
Media Encoding
3DMark'06
F.E.A.R., DOOM3
FarCry 1.4
COD2, Prey
Final Words

Give Us Some Feedback on this Review

AMD's Quad FX Platform
What's in a 4x4?

(Author: MS, January 21, 2007)

Maximum Power

There is always a debate of what is the best application to hammer out the maximum power draw from a CPU. For the sake of consistency, we are sticking with Prime95 (in this case the latest edition), running on both WindowsXP-32 and Windows Vista-64. Naturally, high idle power consumption will skew the overall power rating of the CPU under different loads. To make a long story short, we measured power under both OS for a direct comparison and once again, the results are nothing short of astounding.

WinXP-32 (no C'nQ; light columns) vs. Vista-64 (darker columns). The two values for 2 CPUs show two instances of Prime95 Torturetest running on two cores of the same CPU (low) or one core each per CPU

As it happens, either way, the Quad FX sets new records under full load. Bear in mind, though that the values were measured before the VRM and are, therefore, inflated across the bench by roughly 25%. It is still not entirely clear why the FX-74 exceeds a doubling of the FX-62's power consumption by another 45%, but among the reasons could be (again) BIOS issues or else a shallow or even flat load line on the VRM for higher stability and better overclocking capabilities by compensating for the voltage drop under load. We have seen a similar situation on Foxconn's 975X7AB motherboard, with a Core2 Quad Extreme 6700, the power consumption under load shot up to 220W for the CPU itself, which, on Intel's BadAxe2 board just hit 115W. Bottomline is that some additional tuning of the VRM may well drop the CPU power consumption by 50% - without affecting performance since in the current design a major portion seems to be converted into heat only or else gets shorted to ground.

next page: => Render Power (Efficiency) =>

All advice and educational articles on LostCircuits are free, but if you feel you can, please make a small donation to us!
Thank you!

General disclaimer: This page only reflects the author's personal opinion and assumes no responsibility whatsoever regarding any of the contents or any damages that may occur explicitly or implicitly from reading the contents of this site. All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies.
All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws. Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this site.
Copyright 2002 - 2008 LostCircuits