Activision recently released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the next installment in the popular war game series. Moving away from the World War II setting, Modern Warfare instead centers around a conflict involving Russia and the Middle East. And hey, you even get to die... and then continue the game in the past.

Amazing, look at that... interestingly enough COD4 benefits from CPU differences in the higher resolutions from more processor power, meaning in the lower resolutions our graphics card is the bottleneck. Slightly subjective but we think the latest drivers from ATI did some magical stuff with COD4, as noticed in all our graphics card reviews as well.

Power consumption

Alright then, let's monitor something besides performance... power consumption.

With a TDP of 140W the peak power consumption of the Phenom X4 9950 is rather high. When we load up the processor with 4 cores 100% active, we spot a 223 Watt power consumption. Interestingly enough, close to the Q6600. My problem is that once you start overclocking things get really out of hand. At 3.1 GHz we topped 308 Watts, and that's with the graphics card in idle.

In normal desktop usage and idle states things turn around completely though. The combo AMD 790GX and Phenom X4 guarantees a hefty set of power states. The processors clock down, voltages are lower across the platform. Idle therefore with a graphics card installed you can get as low as 114 Watts. Which to be honest is just really good.

I must say, though the power management features work great, the Phenom X4 processors are a tad on the power hungry side when fully stressed or overclocked.