More Power
I got this cute little toy for Christmas. It has measurements for all kinds of interesting and mildly useless statistics about the power quality and consumption of a device. Since I'm upgrading my processor I figured I'd take it for a spin and see how much dual core is going to hurt my electric bill.
So here's a comparison my my old P4 at 3.0GHz on a very nice IC7 max3 motherboard versus a new AMD X2 4400+ on a relatively value sensitive ASRock Dual SATA 2 board. I'm testing the total draw of the whole system, so I chose to measure a couple different tasks.
Test 1 - Idle
Pretty simple, just get the baseline measurement when the CPU and drives are idle.
Intel:136 AMD:132
Slight advantage for the AMD.
Test 2 - Optical Drive
Here I'm ripping a DVD I own from my optical drive to my hard drive for the purpose of backup and storage.
Intel:140 New System:147
Here the Pentium does a bit better. In considering the whole of the results, I don't have a great explanation as to why Intel wins out in this test.
Test 3 - Drive to Drive Copy
Here I'm copying a large file from one SATA hard drive to another. (Both are Western Digital, 200GB)
Intel:155 AMD:161
Very similar to the above result, could the southbridge be less power efficient on the relatively cheap motherboard?
Test 4 - Peg the CPU
Here I'm encoding to mpeg4 on a local drive (source is on the same drive). The CPU utilization on the P4 is around 92%. For the AMD run I have a single core around 95%, the other floated around 50%
Intel:193 New System:169
AMD is solidly ahead. Even when I went back and pegged both cores of the 4400+ it stayed under 180 Watts. Very Nice. Of course this test is far from conclusive, but even though the p4 is known to be power hungry, I really didn't expect the 4400+ to be this competitive.
Here's a pic of the new system:
Crossposted from Radixsort.com
So here's a comparison my my old P4 at 3.0GHz on a very nice IC7 max3 motherboard versus a new AMD X2 4400+ on a relatively value sensitive ASRock Dual SATA 2 board. I'm testing the total draw of the whole system, so I chose to measure a couple different tasks.
Test 1 - Idle
Pretty simple, just get the baseline measurement when the CPU and drives are idle.
Intel:136 AMD:132
Slight advantage for the AMD.
Test 2 - Optical Drive
Here I'm ripping a DVD I own from my optical drive to my hard drive for the purpose of backup and storage.
Intel:140 New System:147
Here the Pentium does a bit better. In considering the whole of the results, I don't have a great explanation as to why Intel wins out in this test.
Test 3 - Drive to Drive Copy
Here I'm copying a large file from one SATA hard drive to another. (Both are Western Digital, 200GB)
Intel:155 AMD:161
Very similar to the above result, could the southbridge be less power efficient on the relatively cheap motherboard?
Test 4 - Peg the CPU
Here I'm encoding to mpeg4 on a local drive (source is on the same drive). The CPU utilization on the P4 is around 92%. For the AMD run I have a single core around 95%, the other floated around 50%
Intel:193 New System:169
AMD is solidly ahead. Even when I went back and pegged both cores of the 4400+ it stayed under 180 Watts. Very Nice. Of course this test is far from conclusive, but even though the p4 is known to be power hungry, I really didn't expect the 4400+ to be this competitive.
Here's a pic of the new system:
Crossposted from Radixsort.com