Is there an energy efficient upgrade from an Opteron 165?

[JPS]

I have an AMD Opteron 165 that has worked perfectly - it runs at 2.4GHz no problem. I know this is crazy thinking, but I am thinking about changing to a lower wattage CPU in its place. However, I do not want to give up the performance of the OPTY. Ideally, I want to be on par, or exceed, its current performance. My goal in this upgrade is to get the maximum amount of performance at the greatest energy efficiency. By the way, I do not game tons - my system is used primarily for code compiles, symmetric data analysis, and some A/V encoding.

The first thing that comes to mind is one of the AMD 'BLACK' Athlon 64 X2s, most likely the 5000+. I am thinking this as I can overclock it easily to exceed the performance of the OPTY and it runs at 65W instead of the 100+W of the OPTY. The only drawback I can is the 512KB of L2 vs the 1MB of L2 in the OPTY - would I see that much of a hit?

What I don't know enough about are the offerings from Intel. Is there an energy efficient or lower wattage Intel CPU that would be on par, or exceed, the performance of my Opteron 165? If so, which one(s)? Also, can someone suggest a mobo to pair it with (does not need to be SLI either).

I know, that no matter which route I take, I will likely be facing a mobo + RAM upgrade (on top of the CPU) and I am fine with that. Again, my goal in this upgrade is to get the maximum amount of performance at the greatest energy efficiency.

 

[Accord99]

All of the current dual-core C2Ds fit within a 65W envelope, even the 3GHz E6850:

http://www.behardware.com/arti...-fsb1333-and-ddr3.html

The new 45nm C2Ds look to offer a nice power reduction, the recently released reviews suggest 45nm quad-cores will be close to 65nm dual-cores in power consumption. Though cheap ones won't show up for awhile.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: Accord99
All of the current dual-core C2Ds fit within a 65W envelope, even the 3GHz E6850:

http://www.behardware.com/arti...-fsb1333-and-ddr3.html

You forgot to tell him that the 2.1 Ghz E6400 is already way faster than his 2.4 Ghz Opteron, and the 2.4 Ghz E6600 is as fast as the 3 Ghz Athlon 6000. JPS, I think you'd get the most for you money, if you were to buy an E6750, which is 2.66 Ghz, and costs less than $200.

 

[o1die]

I posed the energy consumption question to amd's tech support, but they wouldn't tell me if any phenom cpus would use 55 watts like the 1.7 barcelona. The new penryn is more energy efficient than any amd cpu, but the price will start out high. I'm hoping amd will price phenom less than some of the "q" cpus.