Quote Originally Posted by Chumbucket843 View Post
HT is a big jump in efficiency compared to when it is off. it does a much better job of keeping the cores under full load. thats why its hotter. the wider you make a cpu, the harder it is to keep under load.
Yeah, that's my point. With HT you're sending two sets of commands through the same pipeline, meaning the transistors in that pipeline are busy a higher percent of the time.

I'm assuming Win7 is using the HALT command in the core to lower power consumption, but since any given transistor is less likely to be idle with HT, there are less watts saved because the each cycle is being more effectively used!

That's why I don't see it saving as much power as they say with how we use our computers... But I could be wrong. (that happens more often than I would like... )