[mythtv-users] silent and low-power: AMD or Intel?

John Drescher drescherjm at gmail.com
Wed May 27 23:46:04 UTC 2009


On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 6:49 PM, barbex <barbex at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Now, the subjective question: do you prefer a 199€/40Watt EeeBox with USB
>> Stick or the 700€/400Watt dream machine? It's up to you...
>
> Well I'm sort of aiming for the middle ground!  I'm also a member of
> the "weak-wallet" club.
>
> My current underpowered and overtaxed system is drawing 210 Watts
> according to my cheapo metering device. I would like to beat that in
> better performance with less Watts.
>
> Now if I look on AMD's website they give the TDP for the 45nm
> processors with 95W and a AMD Phenom 9650 costs 114,00 € (ouch!). But
> a 65nm processor like the Athlon X2 has a TDP of 45W and the AMD
> Athlon™ X2 Dual-Core 4850e is only 59,00 €, now that's more like it!
>
> I think I will take the 4850e as a starting point and fit the rest of
> the hardware to it. I think I can put together a system with an 80+
> powersource and other basics and stay close to 300,00 € that way.
>

TDPs have very little to do with idle power. Also the 4850e is no more
energy efficient most 65nm chips at idle and at 1 GHz. Remember with
that chip the energy savings is only because the processor is
frequency limited. You can achieve the same result if you took a
2.9GHz 5600+ and set it to the same Max frequency as what ever the
4850e runs at. Also stay away from Phenom 1 chips. I do not recommend
them.

John


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