I don't see the power consumption of dual cores being so much higher than single cores...
According to
this image, idle power usage of a X2 3800+ EE (65W) is about 6.14W and that of a Sempron 3600+ is about 5.59W (including voltage regulators). That means a modern single core draws about 3W for simply existing - not a huge issue I would think, compared for instance to the ~30W power draw of modest LCD monitors and the ~75W draw of a modest CRT monitor.
Back to the topic of mainboards... is there any 630a/7050 or 690G mobo that you would recommend over all the others? All of them have different amounts of connectors, most are µATX. Do these chipsets generally support outputting over both VGA and DVI (or DVI and HDMI) at the same time? I'm thinking about renewing my entire audio/video/computing setup in due time, but I haven't looked into audio/video components yet so I don't know what connectors I will want (and I'm not sure I want to be HDCP ready
). In any case, having both HDMI and DVI ports seems quite useless unless you can use them both at will and if you leave one of them out you can have an extra parallel port which can be useful.
From the boards supplied by my two favourite online resellers, I've more or less narrowed it down to... only Gigabyte
.
Gigabyte offers these boards with additional S-Video/YPbPr bracket:
- MA69GM-S2H - µATX, 690G, DVI, HDMI, TOSLINK, firewire
- MA69G-S3H - ATX, 690G, Parallel, TOSLINK, HDMI, firewire
Then there is the Abit AN-M2HD which mirrors the S2H but without the DVI port. If I don't care about HDMI/TOSLINK at all I can get the Asrock ALiveNF7G-HDready which gets me Parallel, COM-bracket, DVI, firewire, HDMI-audio over DVI, dual VGA output.
But I'm wondering what you guys would have to say about power consumption, undervolting, etc, or any other reason for favouriting one over the other.