Energy efficency: dual cellys vs. XP1700?

[DrVos]

I had a computer spec'd out for basic HTPC/PVR/Media serving purposes nothing especially fancy: 1.2 Tualatin based celly with a good amount of ram and a whole lot of HD space. I decided to go with the Celeron because this computer would be on essentially 24x7 and I wanted a processor that was as energy efficient as possible.

Having just received my rebadged Pioneer 105 DVD-r drive, i've gotten into DVD authoring and was considering going dual celerons and giving the computer encoding duties as well.

My question is: Power consumption-wise, how would a dual(or sinlge) Tualatin based celeron fair against say an AMD XP1700+?

Thanks all, thought/comments are welcome!

 

[sandorski]

A single should consume less, but a dual I'm not sure.

 

[zephyrprime]

Well, the Athlon's don't support using HALT on idle well so I thinkg even a dual celeron would use less energy. But do any encoding programs support multiprocessors? You may be better off with a P4 which supports SSE2.

 

[HokieESM]

Just so you know, the Tualatin Celerons cannot be run in a dual configuration. In fact, the last celerons to support SMP were the 550s (I think).... and the ONLY Tualatins that support SMP (dualie) are the very expensive P3-S (with 512K of cache).

As far as the heat output, it depends on what you're doing. With a dualie machine, running a single process, you're just going to use ONE processor... and in this case, the P3s will put out significantly less heat. But running two processes.... you'll use both. And the P3s put out more than half of the power of the Athlon. BUT also notice that there is VERY little performance penalty for running two processes under SMP... and a LARGE penatly for running two processes on a single processor (well, a penalty in that neither application runs as fast).

Dualie machines are nice.... especially for people who perform a few VERY processor intensive applications. But when the processors aren't running, it doesn't do anything. And when a single processor is running, well, its only going to be as fast as THAT processor.

And if you're just doing a HTPC/PVR machine, you really just need a single processor. I would buy the tualatin celeron you're talking about and go with it. They don't put out much heat, you can cool them quietly, and wouldn't take too much power. And should be enough for what you're doing. It won't be lightning fast at encoding... but if you were concerned about that, you'd probably fork over for a fast P4.

Best of luck to you!

 

[DrVos]

Thanks for the great replies! Since heat and energy efficiency are more important than speed at the moment, I'll go with the single celly. thanks!