AMD Phenom X3 8750 Tri-Core Processor

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.

The Phenom X3 8750's power consumption characteristics are very interesting.  Despite having an extra core and outperforming the Athlon 64 X2 6400+ more often than not, the X3 8750 used less power than the dual-core chip while under load.  While idling though, the Phenom X3 8750 used somewhat more power than all of the other processors we tested, with the exception of the Phenom X3 9850.  And looking at the graph shows that Intel still has a huge lead in this area, thanks to the power efficiency of their entire platform.