New Mobo for my new AMD 4850e. Objective minimum consumption

Bembotto · Post by **Bembotto** » Fri Apr 25, 2008 3:48 am

Hi everyone, this my 1st topic on this board. I'm Italian so sorry if my english isn't very good.
I'm looking to do a system that will play smoothly the 1080p mkv files and absorbs very very little electricity (<40W). The CPU i've choose is the new AMD Athlon X2 EE 4850e with a TDP of 45W. The question is: what mobo i can match to this processor?

A 7050 Nvidia geforce chipset (such as Asrock NF7G-Hdready) is better or worse than a new 8200 Nvidia chipset (such as Asrock K10N78FullHD-hSLI)?

In future i will buy a Pico PSU of 90W.
thank you for the answers.
Bye

angelkiller · Post by **angelkiller** » Sun Apr 27, 2008 7:31 am

I think an Nvidia 8200 or an AMD 780G motherboard would be the best choice for your CPU. SPCR has reviewed a 780G motherboard and found that the 780G chipset and any modern dual core CPU is enough to play 1080p videos.

Hope this helps.

loimlo · Post by **loimlo** » Sun Apr 27, 2008 9:44 am

By and large, you should exclude 7050 boards from purchasing candidates. There are numerous 780G & GF8200 boards are going to enter the market at some point, and you could grab if you want. For the time being, Gigabyte 780G seems to dominate the AM2 IGP market, but many boards will release in next two weeks from a local source. I suggest you to wait a little longer or otherwise getting a Gigabyte 780G now.

As for cpu, your choice is fine.

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Sun Apr 27, 2008 10:04 am

Welcome to SPCR!

Don't worry about your English.

I'm sure others will chime in with their recommendations just don't be surprised if it isn't right away.

RedAE102 · Post by **RedAE102** » Mon Apr 28, 2008 3:23 pm

As loimlo said, skip the 7050. Despite the misleading specs NVidia released early on, it does not support offloading the decoding of x264 video (all .mkv's I have are x264) from the processor. From the tests I've seen, NVidia 8200 and AMD 780G boards offer much the same, or maybe slightly higher power consumption than the 7050 boards. If I were to buy now, I would definitely go with an 8200 or 780G, since both of them offer so much more than the 7050 with similar power.

frank2003 · Post by **frank2003** » Mon Apr 28, 2008 4:27 pm

Speaking from my experience with the Asus 780G board you are not likely to reach your goal of under 40W playing high compression rate files. For one thing, my board with a BE2350 idles at around 35-37W at 1GHz. Any task that requires GPU or CPU can easily put the power consumption over 40W.

The 780G is certainly very impressive when it comes to playing Blu-Ray movies. I was able play BD Planet Earth (VC1 encoding) smoothly at 1.2GHz with less than 50W power consumption. But that's where the good news ends for the 780G: The same setup that played BD movies smoothly couldn't even play 1080i and 720p MPEG2 HDTV recordings without stuttering. This seems to indicate that 780G is in some way optimized for VC1. I haven't tried anything with H.264 so can't comment on it.

Also, the 780G doesn't do diddly in accelerating this 1080p video clip: http://www.elecard.biz/clips/mp4/misc/FCL_1080p.mp4 . It requires the same CPU power as my 690G board.

I think you will have better luck with a 690G board. If you point me to some of the videos you intend to play I can give you some power consumption figures on the 690G and 780G based systems.

Maverickâ„¢ · Post by **Maverickâ„¢** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 1:40 am

frank2003 wrote:Speaking from my experience with the Asus 780G board you are not likely to reach your goal of under 40W playing high compression rate files. For one thing, my board with a BE2350 idles at around 35-37W at 1GHz. Any task that requires GPU or CPU can easily put the power consumption over 40W.

The 780G is certainly very impressive when it comes to playing Blu-Ray movies. I was able play BD Planet Earth (VC1 encoding) smoothly at 1.2GHz with less than 50W power consumption. But that's where the good news ends for the 780G: The same setup that played BD movies smoothly couldn't even play 1080i and 720p MPEG2 HDTV recordings without stuttering. This seems to indicate that 780G is in some way optimized for VC1. I haven't tried anything with H.264 so can't comment on it.

Also, the 780G doesn't do diddly in accelerating this 1080p video clip: http://www.elecard.biz/clips/mp4/misc/FCL_1080p.mp4 . It requires the same CPU power as my 690G board.

I think you will have better luck with a 690G board. If you point me to some of the videos you intend to play I can give you some power consumption figures on the 690G and 780G based systems.

Maybe a driver's problem?
With the previous chipset generation (690G and 7050PV) the first driver's performance in HD content was poor compared to the last ones

Bembotto · Post by **Bembotto** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 8:16 am

Thank you all guys, after reading your answer i've decided to order a new asrock gf 8200 mobo (called K10N78FullHD-hSLI rev 3.0). It will arrive tomorrow or the day after, so i will post my results very soon.
Bye

loimlo · Post by **loimlo** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 9:42 am

If I were you, I would share fan control function with others. Just kidding

Anyway, I would appreciate your feedback if you were to share opinions on Asrock GF8200. By the way, remember to download the newest driver from nVIDIA website. They had compiled a (un)stable driver release for these tiny boards of late.

Bembotto · Post by **Bembotto** » Fri May 02, 2008 7:26 am

Hi, this is my actual configuration:

Amd 4850e X2
Mobo Asrock K10N78FullHD-hSLI R3.0
2 GB DDR2 A-data (on a single bank)
Western Digital Caviar 500GB Green Power
PSU Fortron 350W
DVD Drive Thoshiba
DVD-rw Pioneer 111d
Floppy Drive

In idle this config uses 44W (1Ghz and 1V of Vcore)
Soon i will do other tests to lower this value.
Stay tuned

Bembotto · Post by **Bembotto** » Sat May 03, 2008 10:17 am

This is my PSU, i think a pico-psu will do much more in energy saving, don't you agree?

http://www.fsp-group.com/english/1_prod ... &proid=367

amyhughes · Post by **amyhughes** » Sat May 03, 2008 11:07 am

Watch the meter during start-up to see how much power is used to bring up all those drives.

Do you need two DVD drives? Do you really need the floppy? Do you save any power at idle by removing them? Do you save any power at start-up?

If you intend to run it at greater than 1GHz, get those power numbers under load doing the kinds of things you intend (video player? DVD copying?) before thinking about a pico PSU. To get a conservative estimate of the power drawn from your PSU, multiply the largest power draw you measure from the wall by about 80%.

If you are able to use a pico, then yes, you will get a good percentage drop in power usage.

lm · Post by lm » Sat May 03, 2008 1:33 pm

However, if you already have a working PSU, ditching it in favor of a more efficient one will never save you back the energy needed for manufacturing it, especially because your energy usage is low to start with.

Bembotto · Post by **Bembotto** » Sun May 04, 2008 6:36 am

amyhughes wrote:Watch the meter during start-up to see how much power is used to bring up all those drives.

Do you need two DVD drives? Do you really need the floppy? Do you save any power at idle by removing them? Do you save any power at start-up?

If you intend to run it at greater than 1GHz, get those power numbers under load doing the kinds of things you intend (video player? DVD copying?) before thinking about a pico PSU. To get a conservative estimate of the power drawn from your PSU, multiply the largest power draw you measure from the wall by about 80%.

If you are able to use a pico, then yes, you will get a good percentage drop in power usage.

I tried switching off my 2 optical drives and i found no difference in idle, so i will keep them. The maximum power consumption i read was 107W (during a stress test, burning a dvd on the fly and playng a 1080p mkv while running superpi 1M...), so what pico i have to buy? Pico 120W is enough?

amyhughes · Post by **amyhughes** » Sun May 04, 2008 6:54 am

Bembotto wrote:The maximum power consumption i read was 107W (during a stress test, burning a dvd on the fly and playng a 1080p mkv while running superpi 1M...), so what pico i have to buy? Pico 120W is enough?

Your maximum power usage doing all those things was likely less than if you had just done the stress test, so try running just the stress test.

Have you already undervolted your CPU? If you plan to, do it before you get the pico. Get a maximum power usage with the setup you intend to use, including undervolting.

Now take your maximum power usage and multiply by 80%. That's a conservative estimate of the draw on your power supply. It's probably less, but better safe than toast. Is that number less than the rating for your intended PSU, including a margin for safety that you're comfortable with?

The best brick for the pico 120 is 110W. It requires no modification, like the 200W Dell brick that some people use. The 110W brick has a fan that turns on under heavy load. I think it turns on at 80W, or maybe it's heat-activated.

For my pico machine I decided that 80W peak load was the most I wanted to push it. My machine has a 77W peak load (from the wall, measured while using the pico) before undervolting, 49W after undervolting and modest underclocking.

Palindroman · Post by **Palindroman** » Wed May 07, 2008 11:18 am

Benvenuto, Bembotto!

The Asrock boards I have tested so far (NF6G and NF7G-HDready) were very efficient, which has been affirmed by various people in different places. I have tested the 4450e on a nVidia 7025-board by Abit, which was also very efficient. Under 100% load and without any undervolting the system drew a maximum of 70 watts. With your setup you would probably go more towards 80 watts. Therefore I would recommend you the picoPSU-120. If you undervolt the CPU you can power the whole thing with an 80 watt AC adapter for sure. Perhaps the (undervolted) system will even idle at around 20 watts. I can't tell for sure as I haven't tested any 8200 boards yet.

Please tell us your results!

ps my thread on the 4450e: viewtopic.php?t=47577