SPCR

Hmm I think a nice midrange Merom would be best. But Meroms will cost more than Conroe. But Conroe should be nice and cool running themselves. ATLEAST as good as current AMD CPUs I would think.

perplex wrote:Hmm I think a nice midrange Merom would be best. But Meroms will cost more than Conroe. But Conroe should be nice and cool running themselves. ATLEAST as good as current AMD CPUs I would think.

We just have to wait for the reviews.

Those may clock a lot more than the 939 as Amd say that they better their transistors all the time.

The cache memorydesign is probably a little bit dif. as well and that could have a big impact on tdp aswell. Lets face it, the cache memory isn't that good on the current Toledos and Manchesters.

But I heard something of a changed Toledo with a bit smaller chache memory to the 939 that would clock higher so there might not be that big a dif. anyway and we will not see someything obvious until 65nm.

MikeC wrote: Here's why I'm not going crazy about it:

That X2-4800+ featured in my recent CPU power article... I've now got it running undervolted on another board w/ an 80+ PSU. At idle, system power is 36W. W/CPUBurn x2, it's at 107W. Avg power will be 43W if you go by the 90% idle/10% max formula I used. It can be cooled by any number of HSF at min noise.

Mike - what motherboard/gfx card etc are you using in that PC?

I've just built a HTPC using the MSI K8NGM2-FID board, onboard 6150gfx, 2x256mb ram, E3 venice 3000+, 2 x compro dtv tuners an a 160gb spinpoint. Lowest idle system power readings i get (measured at the wall socket) are 68W.

I was hoping my system would use less than it does! I'll gain a few % with an 80+ PSU and undervolting the chip rather than just using cnq, but it's still a massive amount more than the 36W in your system!

Marc

perplex wrote:Hmm I think a nice midrange Merom would be best. But Meroms will cost more than Conroe. But Conroe should be nice and cool running themselves. ATLEAST as good as current AMD CPUs I would think.

conroe's will not be cool running. I read a few months ago from intel that the 2.6 ghz conroe and the like are Performance chips not being advertised as energy efficient. a dothan 2.1 pushed to 2.6 did well gaming wise but had the same wattage as a venice core going same ghz.

It would be great to get SOME actual direct yardstick so it would be specific that Chip X with a passive Ninja,open air,hits Y degrees and some other chip hits Z degrees. We have the rough concept that TDP sort of corelates but AMD will claim a worst case TDP for a whole series,such as the Palermos,but the 2800 actually is less heat than the 3400. Intel has another system altogather. Do X2's TDP have the same watts ratio as Venice? as Palermo? ....uh...maybe.

Maybe SPCR could do a CPU test and give us some kind of yardstick,some usable standard.

~El~Jefe~ wrote:

perplex wrote:Hmm I think a nice midrange Merom would be best. But Meroms will cost more than Conroe. But Conroe should be nice and cool running themselves. ATLEAST as good as current AMD CPUs I would think.

conroe's will not be cool running. I read a few months ago from intel that the 2.6 ghz conroe and the like are Performance chips not being advertised as energy efficient. a dothan 2.1 pushed to 2.6 did well gaming wise but had the same wattage as a venice core going same ghz.

If you look at the Max TDP for Conroe which I think is 65W, it seems clear that a 1.86 GHz Conroe is going to consume less power than an X2 3800+ and PROBABLY also give better performance. Undervolting it will put it close to a 35W AM2 X2 3800+, although the later when undervolted itself may still consume less power.

That should be cool running enough for most, unless you’re looking for LV Core Duo type power levels.

It will be so nice the day CPU active cooling is over and CPUs consume single digit W. Passive cooling forever

I think we're a good 5 years away, though even today you could do passive cooling with mobile CPUs I think? But I'm talking about the desktop mainstream product lines from AMD and Intel.

marcmercer wrote:

MikeC wrote: Here's why I'm not going crazy about it:

That X2-4800+ featured in my recent CPU power article... I've now got it running undervolted on another board w/ an 80+ PSU. At idle, system power is 36W. W/CPUBurn x2, it's at 107W. Avg power will be 43W if you go by the 90% idle/10% max formula I used. It can be cooled by any number of HSF at min noise.

Mike - what motherboard/gfx card etc are you using in that PC?

I've just built a HTPC using the MSI K8NGM2-FID board, onboard 6150gfx, 2x256mb ram, E3 venice 3000+, 2 x compro dtv tuners an a 160gb spinpoint. Lowest idle system power readings i get (measured at the wall socket) are 68W.

I was hoping my system would use less than it does! I'll gain a few % with an 80+ PSU and undervolting the chip rather than just using cnq, but it's still a massive amount more than the 36W in your system!

Marc

FYI, I have this board, also, and I've confirmed that you can use RMClock to control the Vcore and multipliers on that board (the BIOS does not give this control.) This can lower your wattage a good bit, especially at idle.