WTF is... Intel's Ivy Bridge Reg Hardware PC Week Intel’s latest processor architecture, codenamed Ivy Bridge, is its previous one, Sandy Bridge, shrunk. Sandy Bridge chips, marketed as second-generation Core i CPUs, were produced using a 32nm process. Ivy Bridge is 22nm Actually, there's a little bit more to it than that. Intel Core i7-3770K …
what i always find annoying, really annoying, is when designing a system for a task and looking at power consumption is the fact that the MB details can never be found...
Often I have to resort to looking at photos, guessing which one looks like it will draw less, buying a few from a shortlist, then plugging a board up and sitting and measuring it against 2 or 3 others..
same with graphics cards, when do you see figures for idle power?
why cant we press for these figures to be made available as part of the spec?
"If you google 'review' together with the name of the component ... you will usually find several very indepth reviews of the component with a whole page dedicated to power consumption."
Have you actually read any of those pages? The estimates that are made for the power consumption of motherboards are the result handwaving and guesswork, and comparison with boards with other chipsets or made by other manufacturers.
It would be nice to have actual data, and it would be nice to see manufacturers competing on running costs and greenness, rather than just on speed and shininess for once.
Granted it would be nice but the main problem with reviews is that nearly every setup is going to be different and that makes it particularly hard for MB manufacturers to guestimate. Should they use a baseline with 4 GB ram? Do we assume all ram chips are created equal, 1066/1300/etc? What about video cards, how many usb devices, hard drives, etc. We haven't even gotten to the biggest elephant in the room which is the power supply where the efficiency changes, sometimes greatly, depending on how hard it's being hit. Sure, the manufacturers could slap together a base config and measure the DC power but we all know everyone will have a different base config.
To top it all off, here in the US some tool will get all the exact same parts, put it together, plug it into the shoddy wiring in the shed, kick off some automated test program to measure the power with a $10 meter rated at 1800 watts with +/-10% full scale accuracy while he goes and uses a stick welder to make up a sparkly new case, on the same circuit of course, and comes back to find it drew 22 watts more than was "advertised by the manufacturer". Naturally, he decides he should sue claiming false advertising, hurt feelings and loss of welding rod while his lawyer figures this should play out nicely as a class action gig worth at least a meeellion dollars.
Can an on-board graphics chip now handle 90% of games including Skyrim and Crysis and separate graphics cards are only needed for CAD, animation, video editing applications and for games where you really must run on three monitors with all the knobs turned up?
It used to be that on-board graphics chips were only used for solitare, and that a separate graphics card was required to run anything complex like a modern FPS.
Is that still the case?
If this is intel's "latest and greatest" why don't I see anything with 6/8 real cores on an LGA 2011?
These chips *still* look inferior to the positively ancient i7 on LGA 1366.
Once upon a time we'd get a new 'extreme' cpu every year. To me, it looks like time stopped in 2008 and we haven't had a real game-changer since. (I hope it has nothing to do with Intel's newly found fondness for mobile SoC's that they don't care much for the 130W TDP beasts).
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