Supported CPU watts

This may have been asked before, but I can't find an answer anywhere.
Could anyone tell me where I would be able to find out the max supported wattage to the cpu on a mother board?

I recently ran into some issues with unlocking my extra cores on an AMD phenom II callisto x2. The name and wattage rating on the cpu description would change but only two cores would be active, I used to be able to get all 4 cores working, but never ran them long before I got my heat sink, now that I have the heat sink i can't use it. After trying various bio settings and reseting/updating the bios i noticed that on my mobo box it said that it only supported up to 140 watts to the cpu, when unlocked the new cpu name stated that it needed 145 watts. This is the last thing left for me to check.

I figure I need a new AM3+ board sometime soon so I would shop for one of those and eventually upgrade to bulldozer in a year or so.

I'm not seeing a cpu wattage rating in any of the motherboard specifications i'm checking out though.

Thats because you dont 'set' the wattage you only adjust the vcore. The wattages are refereing to thermal design specs...

No i meant the maximum wattage pull the cpu socket on the board would support. The orignal wattage draw was only 95 watts, but when i unlocked it, it changed to 145 watts according to the cpuid description.

The motherboard box states that it supports up to 140 watt cpu's. So i'm assuming that since the unlocked cpu has a higher draw than the motherboard would allow the name is all that changed.

I doubt its going to use 53% more power... probably an incorrect reading.
At 12V it would have to jump from 7.9amps to 12.1amps!

Well this may be off of flawed logic, but if its doubling the amount of cores used wouldn't its power needs increase similarly?

Well looks like i slipped up on my end, its been awhile since i've messed around with trying to unlock these cores. just reooked at the stats, here's the screen shots of what cpuid says.



and after the unlock attempts




so its actually and exact double in wattage needs.

Not sure about the AMD's but an intel example I'll use is the Core 2 Duo vs Core 2 Quad... Take a Conroe 65nm dual core vs a Kentsfield 65nm Quad core. The Conroe's TDP is 65W and the Kentsfield is 95W which is about 46% jump... But some of the 45nm chips were a lot closer ie wolfsdale vs Yorkdale.... So i'm just not sure but it sounds like a lot.

CapnFailBoat said:

Well looks like i slipped up on my end, its been awhile since i've messed around with trying to unlock these cores. just reooked at the stats, here's the screen shots of what cpuid says.



and after the unlock attempts




so its actually and exact double in wattage needs.

Click to expand...

I think you will be ok as long as you give it the extra voltage.

Looks like we got a little side tracked. Those two picture i showed you were the same cpu, I was unable to unlock the two cores and tried several methods of doing so. The final conclusion i have now is that the watt going to the cpu were limiting its ability to unlock so i was interested in investing in a new motherboard in the am3+ area for some future upgrades and possibly being able to unlock the cores on the processor i already have. Since the wattage limited my unlock i needed to know how/where to find the watts rating on motherboards. I only found out what the limit was on my current motherboard was because it was printed on the front of the box.