Power consumption
We measured system power consumption, sans monitor and speakers, at the wall outlet using a Watts Up Pro power meter. Power consumption was measured at idle and under a load consisting of a multi-threaded Cinebench 10 render running in parallel with the "rthdribl" high dynamic range lighting demo.

We'll get to HybridPower in a moment, but this first look at 780a power consumption isn't terribly encouraging. Our 780a board consumes quite a bit more juice than one based on the 790FX, regardless of whether Cool'n'Quiet is enabled. The difference in power consumption shrinks under load, but even then, the nForce platform pulls an additional 13 watts.

Nvidia's nForce chipsets have never been particularly power-efficient, so these results aren't all that shocking. However, we're not inclined to pass judgment on the chipset's power consumption just yet. Remember that this is an Asus M3N-HT Deluxe motherboard we're dealing with here, not an Nvidia reference design. We've seen higher-than-normal power consumption from Asus motherboards in the past, most recently with the company's initial P35 offerings.

Overclocking
Phenom processors can be overclocked either by adjusting the CPU multiplier or tweaking the CPU reference clock. The latter should work for any Phenom CPU, since an unlocked multiplier that can be adjusted upwards isn't needed. That's where we started, first dropping the CPU and memory multipliers to take them out of the equation, and then turning the screws on the CPU reference clock. Stability was tested along the way with Prime95 crunching on all four cores.

Unfortunately, we couldn't get the system stable with a CPU base clock higher than 215MHz. 220MHz produced Prime95 errors and even the occasional blue screen, and no amount of voltage fiddling or playing with the CPU north bridge multiplier seemed to help.

Of course, if you're serious about Phenom overclocking, you should really be using a Black Edition CPU with an unlocked upper multiplier.

Just by adjusting the CPU multiplier, we were able to get our Phenom stable at up to 2.8GHz with only a slight bump to the CPU voltage. Additional voltage wouldn't allow our processor to boot with a 14.5X multiplier, though.

We haven't been particularly impressed with Phenom overclocking thus far, and given the affordability of the unlocked Black Edition, your success isn't likely to be dependent on the chipset or motherboard. As is always the case with overclocking, though, your mileage may vary.