AMD's Phenom processor has been power hungry since it's release but that was stepped up even more when the Phenom 9950 was released with a 140W TDP, higher than other desktop CPUs on the market. This sent something of a stir into the enthusiast crowd whether justified or not for a processor with such a high power rating. Recently, however, AMD released a 125W version of the Phenom 9950 after improving the manufacturing process to replace the previous 140W version. Both are still on the market now and we thought we'd take a look at this new Phenom 9950 125W and compare it to the original 140W processor.

Let's start off with the official specs and information from AMD.

The product code differs to "X" from "F" from the Phenom 9950 BE 125W to the Phenom 9950 BE 140W.

As you see the spec voltage range from AMD is exactly the same with the 140W and 125W. The main difference in the official specs is a slight difference in temperature.

We did some quick performance testing on the 125W version and there was no performance difference between the two processors as is to be expected.