Originally Posted by
Manicdan
what do you usually do?
the thing is that your spending power on HDD, MBs, RAM, the cpu alone isnt draining all the energy. so if your goal is for folding@home, then having alot of cores with few accessories is the way to go. but if your just playing games and you want the lowest total power consumption while still having the highest framerate, then i think a 4 core BD is the right choice then. it really is based on what your goals are for the PC
im still debating on which i want to buy for my case (see sig), it weight over 30lbs and dropping in cpu with less cores will drastically lower power consumption (probably not by much for a game, only in full load testing), but the weight wont change, so why not make it a power house with 8 cores. such a dilemma
i wouldnt be worried about the power consumption of BD, with advanced power gating and turbo, your going to see a great increase in perf/watt over current AMD chips, most from the fact its on 32nm, but there are still features that help it out too.