Winning the 'Well, Duh!' award for 7/13/05 - Tom's Hardware!

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derekva
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Winning the 'Well, Duh!' award for 7/13/05 - Tom's Hardware!

Post by derekva » Wed Jul 13, 2005 10:54 am

They test the power efficiency of AMD versus Intel (but neglect the Pentium M).

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20050713/index.html

Strangely, they determine that AMD is more efficient. :)

-Derek

lenny
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Post by lenny » Wed Jul 13, 2005 11:06 am

Next up at Tom's Hardware : do you get wet when you stand in the rain without an umbrella? We'll test different body types, men and women, under showers, downpour and a slight drizzle, with our test subjects wearing cotton, polyester and silk.

They did have one useful observation, although it is rather vague:
PCI Express chipsets seem to draw more power than AGP core logic.

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Post by StarfishChris » Wed Jul 13, 2005 12:59 pm

"What is better at cleaning your teeth? We've lined up soap, sandpaper, sulphuric acid, and of course toothpaste.

<snip>

Conclusion: Toothpaste was the best by a long way. Although sandpaper and sulphuric acid removed plaque, they also destroyed most of the tooth's coating and thus were too effective to be useful. It is likely that the main reason toothpaste was so successful is that it didn't begin with 's'."

(for the UK people: they also tested 'Cillit Bang' but the reviewer didn't survive to give a report ;))

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Post by BrianE » Wed Jul 13, 2005 1:23 pm

I'm not sure what all the sarcasm is for.... just because this is something SPCR and more tech-savvy computer users already know, doesn't mean that everyone else knows it and that it doesn't deserve a closer look.

I think it's a good topic to write about because it actually discusses, tests, and proves the lower power consumption of AMD systems. I didn't read the whole article, but I liked looking at the test results comparing some power measurements, and if nothing else it's a good demonstration for public education.

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Post by Tibors » Thu Jul 14, 2005 1:17 am

I agree with Brian. In the intended audience of Tom's hardware (which most visitors here clearly are not, as we are way too smart ;) ) there are probably a lot of people who never even considered this aspect of CPU's before. It won't hurt to put this under their noses. I know people who still think AMD chips are hot, just because they had that problem with a part of their Athlon XP line.

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Post by Bitter Jitter » Thu Jul 14, 2005 3:45 am

Question 1: Why didn't they show power consumption with Cool n quiet on and off but they did with the P4's Speedstep on and off ?

Question 2: What is the efficiency of the power supply at different loads?
Tomshardware wrote:
The power supply we used has an average efficiency of around 70% and can be considered a decent choice, although there are better ones around now.

Nice and scientific!

One good thing to come out of the article was as Lenny pointed out, the difference between PCI express and AGP. That must be really bad news for laptops.

Its plain to see why SPCR is so highly respected when other hardware sites are still only scratching the surface on what is a time consuming and precise test.

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Post by jojo4u » Thu Jul 14, 2005 4:58 am

Bitter Jitter wrote:One good thing to come out of the article was as Lenny pointed out, the difference between PCI express and AGP. That must be really bad news for laptops.
Regarding the notebooks PCIe power issues, I started a new thread:
http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?p=196142

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Post by nosoup_fouru » Thu Jul 14, 2005 5:03 am

BrianE wrote:I'm not sure what all the sarcasm is for....
Because there is nothing more fun than mocking Toms these days, too many times they have been caught showing extreme bias, using flawed scientific methods, outright dishonesty, etc... And just as many times they have editorialized about how legit and forthright they are with their readers, and taken shots at other web sites as well. Toms deserves all the abuse we can muster, and more...

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Post by amplemind » Thu Jul 14, 2005 7:09 am

Because there is nothing more fun than mocking Toms these days, too many times they have been caught showing extreme bias, using flawed scientific methods, outright dishonesty, etc... And just as many times they have editorialized about how legit and forthright they are with their readers, and taken shots at other web sites as well. Toms deserves all the abuse we can muster, and more...
What? I think tomshardware.com is great, and the VGA/CPU charts are the best by far.

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Post by derekva » Thu Jul 14, 2005 8:52 am

BrianE wrote:I'm not sure what all the sarcasm is for.... just because this is something SPCR and more tech-savvy computer users already know, doesn't mean that everyone else knows it and that it doesn't deserve a closer look.

I think it's a good topic to write about because it actually discusses, tests, and proves the lower power consumption of AMD systems. I didn't read the whole article, but I liked looking at the test results comparing some power measurements, and if nothing else it's a good demonstration for public education.
Most of my sarcasm was around the fact that the AMD processors soundly whupped the Intel processors (in both efficiency *and* performance), yet THG's conclusion was a rather tepid "choose whichever works for you" rather than "Intel's got some 'splainin' to do".

And I agree, the VGA / CPU charts *are* valuable, but often the bias on THG is pretty blatant.

-Derek

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Sat Jul 16, 2005 3:04 pm

Bitter Jitter wrote:Question 1: Why didn't they show power consumption with Cool n quiet on and off but they did with the P4's Speedstep on and off ?

Question 2: What is the efficiency of the power supply at different loads?
Tomshardware wrote:
The power supply we used has an average efficiency of around 70% and can be considered a decent choice, although there are better ones around now.

Nice and scientific!

One good thing to come out of the article was as Lenny pointed out, the difference between PCI express and AGP. That must be really bad news for laptops.

Its plain to see why SPCR is so highly respected when other hardware sites are still only scratching the surface on what is a time consuming and precise test.
the top of the line Extreme edition 840 D 2xcore jobby has speedstep removed :)

and it really doesnt do much on the lower ones with it on.
It's no cool and quiet. More like, less than volcanic magma settings.

dual prescott! now theres an efficient choice!

dual northwood? dual xeon (dothan?) dual tualatin? dual toaster ovens?

whatever happend to dual dothan's in the dual core line i duno. i was actualyl going to buy intel in this round of dual core because i was expecting dual dothan cores... wiht like 4 megs cache :) yum

x2 4400 for me

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Post by anaqer » Sat Jul 16, 2005 10:09 pm

~El~Jefe~ wrote:whatever happend to dual dothan's in the dual core line i duno.
You mean Yonah?

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Sun Jul 17, 2005 7:16 am

yah i guess, but that is 65nm so screw that idea intel. they needed to make the 90 nm dothan NOW. They could have beat out AMD but no, not happening for another year.... which by then the world will have changed.

dead in the water, that company is smoking some crack.

imagine that a 3700 754 chip with crap ram runs games faster than a pentium EE by a good margain. whacked out.

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Post by nosoup_fouru » Sun Jul 17, 2005 3:11 pm

amplemind wrote: What? I think tomshardware.com is great, and the VGA/CPU charts are the best by far.
While some of their comparison charts are useful they have been caught showing bias more than a few times in their stand alone reviews. Every word you read at Tom's should be taken with a huge grain of salt and validated by several concurring reviews.

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Sun Jul 17, 2005 5:01 pm

yeah, they were doing legit reviews a year ago about on amd, and then halted on xeon saying xeon was doing more than opteron for graphics... at th same moment when sun and movie production facilities were buying up opterons... then they didnt show 939's in "cpu shootouts" and skipped up to like the rediculously rip off fx series saying that intel was best aside from 1000 dollar fx chips. which when anyone knows is bogus and pointless as people just want to know what really is better and not be a fanboy.

trust me.... if people noticed that amd was crapping out hard on thm performance wise, they would ditch it quick. Look at the CPU comparision table thing, or the "use this vid card on this system" thing and they are using newcastle and clawhammer non-dual channel setups half the time. I think they used to be good and accurate but now just suck.

ever look at the psu section????? jeez. its like completely off and incorrect in just about every way. it used to be a tight site with a lot of science behind it.

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Post by anaqer » Sun Jul 17, 2005 11:18 pm

~El~Jefe~ wrote: it used to be a tight site with a lot of science behind it.
Oy, that's a good one.

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Tue Jul 19, 2005 12:31 pm

bah come on... it used to have things about wiring, about chip manufacture process, super computers, future technologies (not 1 month in future, like 2 years non intel/amd tech.)

it was a heck of a lot better than it is now.

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Post by Freelancer77 » Tue Jul 19, 2005 11:29 pm

I've learned a great deal from review's on Tom's. Until around a year ago, when I too started noticing a mild odor accompanying some articles. Not all, mind you, but some.

The breaking point for me was the current round of CPU comparisons, which completely leave out the AMD San Diego core chips, which are the best performing/most efficient/coolest running CPU's made at their respective base clock speed.

I can't believe how well my 3700 San Diego runs, and stays so very cool doing it. Yesterday I was doing a 3dsmax render of a scene with 237,148 faces, 8 various lighting sources, ray traces and mental ray textures, and during the 4 minutes required to complete the task (6600GT isn't exactly a workstation graphics card), the CPU stormed up to a whopping 49C.

Understand, my heatsink is an Arctic Cooling Freezer64, with a very SLOW running fan. I'd have been worried about choosing it with a different cored CPU. But within 75 seconds of the render finishing, the CPU was back down to 40C. Oh, ambient temp was 31C, which didn't help much.

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Wed Jul 20, 2005 8:47 pm

yeah. i duno why people here even bother with the comparison thingie.

only chip intel makes thats beautiful is the dothan, everything else is crap till they go 65 nm or something. tsk tsk.

I wonder what ram type, dual or single, will the x2 use on laptops.

be funy if a 754 board has now x2 and stuff :)

i think it'd be a waste, but maybe not voltage/power wise! eh?

probably still be :)

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