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Total system power usage X2 vs P4

C

CU

Platinum Member
Right now I have a P4 1.8ghz Northwood w/ 768megs ram running mythtv, but after upgrading my main rig I have an X2 3800, ASRock 939Dual-SATA2, and 3gigs of ram I could use. Believe it or not the P4 with a PCI 8400gs runs mythtv and can playback tv without any problems. I am amazed how well it does. Even dropping back to the desktop and browsing the web with 5+ tabs is fine. So the gigantic speed increase is not that meaningful to me. Getting PCI-express and SATA ports would be nice though, but not needed at this point. So, I have two options sale my old X2 system for $100+ and keep the P4 or trash the P4 (not sure what else to do with it) and convert my X2 system to mythtv. How much if any would the X2 save me in power, what if I downclock and undervolt it? Also how good is linux support for the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2? I would also need to buy a sound card with optical out for the X2 system and maybe a new PSU as I am not sure if the one powering the P4 will work.
 
Hmm. I'd really advise selling it all. And getting this stuff :

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813138283 $60

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103888 $40

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820104219 $12

The mobo supports unlocking, and so does the CPU. Even without unlocking, having all of those features and quiet, low power, the thing would be a better solution than either of your above. You'd be on DDR3, proper HDMI and DVI output, new Sata/PCIe, able to upgrade to X6 in the future, etc, etc.
 
Arkaign said:
Hmm. I'd really advise selling it all. And getting this stuff :

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813138283 $60

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103888 $40

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820104219 $12

The mobo supports unlocking, and so does the CPU. Even without unlocking, having all of those features and quiet, low power, the thing would be a better solution than either of your above. You'd be on DDR3, proper HDMI and DVI output, new Sata/PCIe, able to upgrade to X6 in the future, etc, etc.
Click to expand...


Please do what Arkgain said. You will see a nice improvement over the P4 and Athlon you have.

Your well over due for a upgrade and it doesn't get better bang for the buck then this. Also one day you have money grab a 460 1GB and throw her in there replace the 8400GS. gl

P4 @ 1.8Ghz pownz :wub: 🙁
 
Sell it. I owned a 939Dual-SATA2 with an X2-3800. The system was a power hog and would not take too high temps and could not OC even 5%. I have another X2 system that runs 30C hotter all day long and dont skip a beat with a 20% OC. (I'm not saying I run it all day long, just that it can...)
 
The PCI 8400gs handles playback very well thanks to VDPAU even doing HD, if I replaced it I would go to a GT220 for better De-interlacing capabilities. But a 460 is just overkill for video decoding and wastes power.

Unfortunately VAAPI which is what INTEL HD 2/3000 and AMD use for video decoding in linux is not as stable or feature rich as nvidia's solution. So, that makes getting a new MB with that kind of video built in rather pointless.

Like I said speed wise the system is fine. LiveTV uses less than 50% cpu. Now if I start transcoding video to save space then a faster cpu would help alot. Mainly interested in saving power. New features like SATA would be nice though. Might not be worth effort right now like gmaster456 said atleast until I buy an SSD boot drive and need SATA.

By the way my X2 3800 ran for years at 2.6ghz. I really liked the system. It would post and load windows at 2.8ghz, but was not that stable. Only used an old Zalman 7700alcu, I am sure a better heatsink would have helped me there.
 
I did a power comparison between my old Athlon X2 3800+ vs. an old E8400.

The athlon was on an Asus A8N-SLI board with multiple SATA/IDE ports. I could get it down to around 100 Watts idle but with one IDE drive spinning, but when I put 2 IDE hard drives, it ran around 200 Watts idle but with drives spinning.

The E8400 would idle around 80 Watts. So, to me, it makes sense to get rid of the old power hog and avoid wasting 120 watts which would add up A LOT over time for a file server. 80 watts is much better than 200 watts for essentially the same function, but using newer tech. Old tech was inefficient.
 
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