Chip heat output / power consumption?

Sooty · Post by **Sooty** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 1:49 am

I’m trying to discover what power consumption / heat output differential, there might be between these.

NF4-SLI - NF4-Ultra - VIA K8T800Pro - VIA K8T890

How do I find out? Do motherboard specs mention this?

We seem obsessed with CPU heat, but if what I’ve been reading about the NF4 chip, is anything to go by, there should be equal concern regarding chip heat

Ironic · Post by **Ironic** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 3:25 am

Here you go:

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20050 ... is-15.html

Mikael · Post by **Mikael** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 3:56 am

A board like the Abit AV8 seems to be a really good choice if one wants to minimize chipset power output. One downside is the lack of PCI-E, though. K8T890 has it, but then power output rises considerably. Not to the levels of the dreaded Nforce4, though...

rpsgc · Post by **rpsgc** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 4:29 am

What do you think the levels of power consumption will be for the new nForce4 SLI X16 / C51 ? They have both NB/SB so the NB *should* be cooler, no? Or they'll just add features in the SB instead of "dividing" the features?

StarfishChris · Post by **StarfishChris** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 5:10 am

Ironic wrote:Here you go:

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20050 ... is-15.html

Did Tom's Hardware even bother turning on Cool 'n' Quiet, or would it put the Intel platforms to shame? However for the purposes of comparing AMD chipsets the drop should be the same.

Sooty · Post by **Sooty** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 5:35 am

Thanks Ironic. So there’s a 19w-22w difference between the NF4-Ultra and K8T800Pro at both idle and load. That seems a lot, and all for what? There’s talk of a very slight speed advantage (probably for gamers only – I don’t play games) and a firewall/lan (that seems to cause problems for most people). I too am back favoring the K8T800Pro, except that some people tell me ‘VIA are crap’, but they don’t explain why. The more I search the web for reasons why, the more I can’t find anything, except maybe an incompatibility with ATI graphics – which I’m not going to use.

Are the people saying ‘VIA are crap’, just gaming snobs who wouldn’t consider anything but NVIDIA?

datapappan · Post by **datapappan** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 6:06 am

As for Via and ATI, check my sig - no issues with the PT880. The VT7 board is good bang for bucks, has 5.1 sound, GbitLAN, SATA and *NO* on-board graphics, good for my gaming. Handles FSB800, dual-DDR as well, although I'm not using it right now.

Sorry, no power figures.

/ datapappan

scruzbeachbum · Post by **scruzbeachbum** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 7:08 am

VIA went through a cycle of crappy compatability back in the kt133 days when they were scraping for $'s. At the same time NVidia came out with excellent (by comparison) chipsets and timely BIOS updates. That was when I switched over. Can't speak to today's products.

Mikael · Post by **Mikael** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 1:55 pm

I think that people bash VIA for errors that should be long forgotten now. As far as I know, there haven't really been any more problems with VIA chipsets than Nforce chipsets for the Athlon64 platform.

rpsgc · Post by **rpsgc** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 1:59 pm

I had a VIA KT600 and now I have a KT880, no problems with it. VIA chipsets just aren't as fast as nVIDIA's

But we still don't know the power consumption of ATI and ULI chipsets!