coretemp says I use 115 watts at my setting. that's alot no? :sneaky:
Each molex pin is spec'ed for current. I believe these pins are 6A pins. I don't know the exact size, but Molex provides current ratings for the various size pins they use. If these are 6A pins, then it means 6A * 12v * 2 pins = 144 Watts on a typical 4 pin Molex. Wire size doesn't matter, the limitation is the connection.
8 pin connectors and 15 phase motherboards are for 2 things:
1) LN2 overclockers
2) marketing and trying to get people to "overbuy" for their needs.
If you're air cooling and not going for insane OCs, 4 pins and 4-6 phases are
plenty.
The mobo marketers know that people are counting phases and not looking at the capacity of chokes and such, so some are using 20A components and running tons of phases, and others are using 60A+ components, using less phases and able to provide just as clean a power... more efficiently.
IVB CPU is using around 50W at a low voltage 4GHz OC, and closer to 100W at a typical air cooling ~4.5GHz OC at full utilization. The CPU is pretty efficient, and most of us aren't using the iGPU that accounts for a portion of the 77W TDP. These kinds of features just aren't a big deal to OCing. Even the ASUS interview with Anand, the guy comes out and says all their boards will OC similarly and they're trying to seperate themselves with other features.
Motherboard "counting wars" is the same thing as the megapixel wars in cameras. the glass and sensor quality matter a lot more than the number of megapixels (especially when primarily viewing a 10+ megapixel image on a 2 megapixel 1080p screen). But you can't put an easily quantifiable number on quality of the sensor and the quality of the optics in a camera... you can however put a number on the pixels the sensor can resolve, and it's easy to convince people "bigger is bettter" or "more is better'. Motherboard marketing understands that people are counting and they're charging up the ass for those extra pins and phases because everyone knows "moar is bettar!!"
Unless you're using sub-ambient cooling and looking for MAJOR OCs, shop for a mobo based on:
1) Port connections you want / need
2) layout you like
3) PCI / PCI-e configuration you like
4) Price
5) Power efficiency (really this is a "long term" component of #4 - Price)
Beyond that the other features are
at most going to make 100 MHz of difference on an OC.
