Latest Deskop Quad Cores with LOW Power Consumption, any thoughts??

No, there's nothing out there that will slash your electric bill nor is anything coming out that will. The Via CPU you were drooling over is nothing comparable to what you have now as it's on the same plane as Intel Atom chips or AMD's comparable offerings.

The TDW for the upcoming Haswell should be similar but if you are using an add-in GPU, it takes away from your power savings. Keep in mind that the 120 watt listing for your CPU is not what it actually uses in real day operation. It's probably significantly less. My older quad-core system barely tops 100 watts and I've got a GTS 450, 16GB of RAM, and a Q6600.

I think you're just better off suspending or hibernating the PC when you're not using it. I would think that any power savings from switching CPUs wouldn't really be noticeable in your power bill.

You will not notice anything on your bill switching, it's a waste of time even thinking about it. Get a mobo with stepspeed or enable it if you have it and your done. Your 920 will use less than 35 watts when it clocks down.

There is no processor on earth that you can buy that will give you similar performance and justify it's cost in power savings by the time the processor is no longer useful. The cost to purchase the CPU is just too high, and electricity is just too cheap. The math does not work out.

This is especially true with you living in a colder climate. Every watt that your CPU uses becomes heat. That waste heat heats your home. If you also heat your home with electric baseboard or forced-air heaters, this discussion becomes even sillier. It doesn't matter where a watt of electricity becomes heat, it converts and costs exactly the same.

Doing some rough back of the napkin math, where power costs $0.20/kwh, you are pumping the heat directly outside because you don't want it, and you save an unbelievably optimistic 30w per hour running the machine every hour of every day, you break even on a $200 CPU at about 3.5 years in to it's life. A) A 3.5 year old CPU is reaching the end of it's life anyway, B) these numbers are super-generous in favor of proving out positive power savings. Back in the real world, where you probably use the machine a maximum of 6 hours each day, and actually want the majority of that waste heat, you'd see a cost savings in like 15 years at the earliest, but probably closer to 60 years living in a cold area of the world. Go ahead and pick up the 45w Core-i7, then make sure to come back in 2072 when you do your next upgrade to let us know how it worked out for you.

So, no. Do not change CPUs purely for power savings. That is not a smart idea. Instead, the next time you upgrade for performance reasons take power efficiency in to concideration.

Math. It's what's for dinner.
Edited by darklordjames - 9/28/12 at 2:27pm

No. Bad scam. Bad, 800mhz x 64 simple cores is not 45ghz.

Let's use that horrible scam-math on your Radeon 5750. 720 cores x 700mhz = 492ghz!!!1one

Ermahgerd can I install WIndows 7 on it? It would be the most amazing thing ever made!!!

thats only at Idle, most 920's run at about 115 watts max. You can also lower your voltage on your chip and under clock it. Just like in overclocking, you can lower the voltage and see the max you can under volt it and it still be stable. Though personally, I don't see whay it matters one way of the other. If all you want to do is surf the net, get a tablet and use the PC for games.

Yep this is my plan. Right now I use my smartphone to surf stuff.. could use my laptop but then I got to boot it up all the time. GF keeps her comp on 24/7 so if im really needing to do some business stuff, I do it on there. Gaming PC is strictly what the name is. Keep the crap off it.

If you are looking to save power, one thing that might work is to buy a nice SSD, if you do not already own one, another thing you could do is upgrade to windows 8. The combination of these 2 things would allow you to shutdown the computer completely and boot it up so fast you would never think twice about it. heck you could power it down just when you are running to the bathroom.

That said I agree with everyone else, the amount of money you will save will never add up, the only want to make serious power reductions is to buy a crappier computer that cannot handle gaming etc... It reminds me of all those people who went out and threw out all those incadescent light bulbs and converted to CFL to save power. At that time CFLs were pretty expensive, heck even up till recently they were. It just didn't add up would have taken them forever to make the money back. If you are concerned about power wait till you are ready to upgrade then keep it in mind when you select your components.
Edited by PubFiction - 11/5/12 at 12:31am