Tom's: The Truth About Power Consumption

[SKYMTL]

Tom's has published an article entitled "The Truth About Power Consumption"

LINK

Anyone want to pick this one apart?

[jonnyGURU]

LOL!

Woooooo hoooo......

I love how the FOCUS is on CPU power consumption. It's not the CPU's that's the concern. It's the GPU's. Always has been. When people come into a forum and ask "will this PSU be enough to power my new QX6700" there is no answer until the type of graphics card is provided.

They're using a single 8600 card.. a card that pulls next to NOTHING and is barely able to play most games, including DX10 games despite it's DX10 support. And, once again, 3D Mark and PC Mark are being used as the standard. At BFG, we can't even get the GPU cooler on most graphics cards to spin up using 3D Mark. Even ATI Tool can get a GPU to heat up faster.

This is bad. But oh well..... let people heed their advice and blow their shit up. Not my fault.

Where's my "Epic Failure" graphic? Oh wait... here it is...

[Super Nade]

Where is burebista when you need him?

[Bbq]

So tom's have basicly shown several things in that:
1. Intel Core2duo outperforms AMD
2. The second rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club

[burebista]

I'm here. Fortunately I don't read Tom's reviews.
After jonny's thread about SLI power consumption I still lick my wounds.

[Super Nade]

You should be paying me $50 at the minimum for mental anguish.

[signmeuptoo]

So Tom's Hardware assessment is written in a way that could lead people to a broad generalization that is wrong, right? That isn't responsible journalism if indeed it is true, which seems obvious.

If they wanted to prove something, they should have built an SLI and a Crossfire pair of systems with top end video cards with large RAIDs and showed results that claim lower usage. Their argument using such an anemic setup isn't a very strong one. They didn't even chose an 8800GTS!

Oh well, I guess this will just perpetuate the belief for people who want to think a certain way.

[danbfree]

I took it as they ONLY were comparing CPU power consumption, period. Nothing to do with power supplies, GPU's or total system consumption at all... They shown that Intel C2D's are actually more efficient than AMD's X2's when most people gave the AMD's credit for at least being more efficient. Nothing personal, but this has nothing to do with power supplies at all and as such is posted in the wrong forum. Unless I totally missed something, which I very well could have?

[jonnyGURU]

Originally Posted by danbfree

I took it as they ONLY were comparing CPU power consumption, period. Nothing to do with power supplies, GPU's or total system consumption at all... They shown that Intel C2D's are actually more efficient than AMD's X2's when most people gave the AMD's credit for at least being more efficient. Nothing personal, but this has nothing to do with power supplies at all and as such is posted in the wrong forum. Unless I totally missed something, which I very well could have?

You are correct, the article IS about CPU power consumption, but there's a misconcetion that the CPU dictates the power supply. Like I said, I will often get asked "I'm upgrading to a QX6700 and I'm not sure my PSU can handle it." It's simply not a concern unless you're building a ITX PC for your car that's going to be powered by a PICO PSU and you car alternator/battery.

[SnooP]

Originally Posted by danbfree

I took it as they ONLY were comparing CPU power consumption, period. Nothing to do with power supplies, GPU's or total system consumption at all... They shown that Intel C2D's are actually more efficient than AMD's X2's when most people gave the AMD's credit for at least being more efficient. Nothing personal, but this has nothing to do with power supplies at all and as such is posted in the wrong forum. Unless I totally missed something, which I very well could have?

True, but they should not have a general title like 'the truth about power consumption', rather something like 'cpu power consumption shootout: amd vs intel' or something similar. title is entirely misleading as mentioned. Also the comparison isn't entirely fair since nvidia motherboard chipsets are known to generally be more power hungry than intel's. So this bumps up the amd power consumption results since it is for the entire system. imo a more fair comparison would be to use nvidia chipsets for both the intel and amd boards (say 680 vs 680i), or even better measure the cpu power consumption on its own.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13351/13
http://techreport.com/articles.x/10023/19