MikeC: I guess it's a bit hard to decide how to perform a test like that. Testing the components as they are out of the box is never wrong, however most of us are interested in what a little bit of tweaking can bring. Of course I'm talking about undervolting. The negative aspect of undervolting in a test is that the results are individual for each CPU. On the other hand it could be just as individual as the acoustics of HD's.
1. What's your opinion about underclocking desktop and mobile AMD CPU's? Have you noticed any difference? If comparing a desktop and a mobile CPU with the
same stock Vcore (like T64ML and some A64) the mobile one probably wins the low power race. But for some reason I have this idea about desktop CPU's having more underclocking headroom than the mobile counterparts.
2. Does the individual TDP of newer AMD CPU's mean anything in real world usage? Will I see notice difference in heat output between a 50 W and a 80 W CPU? (same OPN) It feels like I'm the only one who wants to know this, I haven't seen any kind of discussion about it here at SPCR, surprisingly.
See here, last posts. Just the fact that there are standard Opteron 175 (2.2 GHz, dual core, 2x1 MB L2 cache) available with a 35 W TDP (they are
documented by AMD, not talking about low power "EE" or "HE" models) would be interesting enough, but so far I've been treated as a daydreamer when I've mentioned it here in the forums.
I just don't know what to believe. The individual TDP could be something important when doing some tests with AMD CPU's, and maybe preferrable than the max TDP. The problem is that you need to use the CPU to find out the TDP, so there's no chance you can cherrypick one when buying.
Here's the software if anyone is interested.
3. Do you think thermal probes on the CPU heatsink could be a good way to measure the heat output? The other two ways doen't seem reliable to me. Measuring the power input on different mobos gives different results, and the temps reported from the mobo seems pretty different on every model.
If these questions will be answered in the article then I'll wait for it.