PCIe interface needs a lot of power

jojo4u · Post by **jojo4u** » Thu Jul 14, 2005 4:57 am

Bitter Jitter wrote:One good thing to come out of the article was as Lenny pointed out, the difference between PCI express and AGP. That must be really bad news for laptops.

(from this thread: http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=23649)
Yes it is. Actually the offline magazine C't was quite disappointed with the new generation since it draws some watt more than the AGP generation. So the new notebooks are barely faster but have less run time....

Here some figures for office work:

average of new notebooks with extra graphic chip: 23W
new notbebooks with integrated graphics: 14W (Toshiba+Samsung) and 17W (Dell)
average of old notebooks with extra graphic chip: 15W
average of old notebooks with integrated graphic: no less than ~13W (not much samples here)

conclusion: The new PCIe interface sucks a lot of power. The test is from march, so there might be some power saving technologies implemented by now.

Bitter Jitter · Post by **Bitter Jitter** » Thu Jul 14, 2005 5:08 am

I did read somewhere that ATI mobile cards are able to shutdown some of the PCI Express link when its not being used. How effective this is i'm not sure.
You would have thought when they came up with the specification for PCI express that they would have considered the laptop market more, considering the amazing growth it has been going through recently?

jojo4u · Post by **jojo4u** » Thu Jul 14, 2005 6:46 am

The C't comments on this:

"The power saving technology announced by ATI of disabling lanes would make sense in this light. But it's not working among the test candidates. Wether it's missing in the X600/X700 or wether the driver or chipset cause the problems remained unclear till press date."