Quote Originally Posted by Manicdan View Post
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.
For me it's all about the idle power. I have a reasonably high spec system, but for the most part it just sits idle, or eventually goes to sleep. If I do play games it's not for a lot of time, generally. Most time I'm on the PC it's just browsing the net etc, which has a very low drain on the system.

So what matters to me isn't how efficiently it crunches through data, it's more about how little power the board, cpu and graphics card use when idle.

I'm all for having lots of power on tap, but I want it to gracefully idle at low wattage consumption when I'm not using it.