In order to test power consumption, we measured the total power intake of the system. Where possible, we used the exact same components between the two systems.

• motherboard: Asus L1N64-SLI WS (chipset NVIDIA nForce 680a SLI)
• motherboard: EVGA 680i SLI (chipset NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI)
• 4 Gbytes memory DDR2-800 Corsair, modello Dominator TWIN2X2048-8500C5D (4 moduli da 1 Gbyte); impostazione memoria con timings 4-4-4-12 2T
• hard disk Western Digital Raptor 150 Gbytes, configurato con un'unica partizione da 150 Gbytes
• sched video: NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
• Power Supply : Be Quiet! Dark Power PRO 580 Watt

There is little to talk about regarding the power consumption tests and the conclusion is simple: the Quad FX platform has a very high level of power consumption under idle and full load. It is important, however, to take into consideration the different chipsets used on the motherboards and the three fans which are mounted on the Quad FX system. Despite this, as a whole the consumption of the Quad FX system is quite high compared to Quad core Intel systems.

For our temperature tests, we ran 3 sessions of POV-Ray 3.7 multitasking beta benchmark sequentially using Core Temp Beta 0.94 to report the temperatures. The test systems were not enclosed in cases, so it is likely that operational temperatures might rise when in a home environment.

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6600

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800

AMD Athlon 64 FX74

AMD Athlon 64 FX72

AMD Athlon 64 FX70

The temperatures are quite similar throughout, but the AMD solutions run slightly cooler. A factor that might contribute to Intel’s Quad core solutions having higher temperatures is how all four cores are in once processor. For AMD solutions tested, each processor has only two cores.