Blu-ray Power Consumption

We took the H.264 test and looked at total system power consumption with CnQ enabled vs. disabled. EIST was enabled for both Intel platforms:

H.264 Playback Power Consumption

With CnQ disabled, Intel has a huge power consumption advantage. It's big enough that we'd almost recommend staying away from the AMD platforms; unfortunately, the issues that plagued Intel's G45 in our first article keep it from being the ideal HTPC solution. You're either better off with G45 + a Radeon HD 4550 or one of these AMD platforms.

H.264 Playback Power Consumption

With CnQ enabled the Intel power consumption advantage is significantly reduced; however, the sacrifice is the occasional stutter during Blu-ray playback. Ugh, we hate tradeoffs. Hopefully AMD can work with their partners to address this issue, but for the time being it remains a significant concern.

Hardware Accelerated Blu-ray Playback Comparison General Performance Showdown
Comments Locked

41 Comments

View All Comments

  • sergev - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link

    A fair comparison? Don't think so! A AMD processor with a 140 Watt TDP and a Intel processor with a 95 Watt TDP?? I wonder why the intel chipsets seem more power efficient? If you are testing the performance, ok seems fair, but power efficiency should be measured with two processors with the same TDP. I am convinced that if you did the same test with a AMD 4850E the AMD would beat the crap out the intel versions on power consumption. But yet again, that would not be fair. So keep in mind that this review is not to be taken al to seriously!
  • axiomhk - Tuesday, October 28, 2008 - link

    Hi, what amazes me is that it seems no reviewers of the AMD IGP chipsets have caught the serious 2D issues referred to here:

    http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=2...">http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview....9&th...

    However, the only channel that we consumers / mere mortals have to put pressure on AMD is to send feedback to the Catalyst team. Nothing seems to get done and there is not even any acknowledgement that this issue exists across the HD3200/HD3300 IGPs no matter which manufacturer.

    The 3D performance is hyped up and that's all very well when the chipset has shown that it can deliver, but in fact many users will spend a lot of time on 2D activities which truly suck. This makes a lot of users regret their purchase.

    What the renowned sites such as anandtech and tomshardware can do is try to reproduce the issues, then use their direct contacts to try to see if this issue is being addressed and update the parent article accordingly. Is it possible? Many thanks. GM - Hong Kong.
  • Zap - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link

    "The keyboard is not available after drive recognition until the Windows startup routine"

    Try a different keyboard, or a PS/2 keyboard. I had the same problem with two MSI 750a boards and some Razer USB keyboards. No keyboard until Windows. I had to fix a BIOS problem and had to borrow a keyboard - Logitech G15 USB keyboard worked fine.
  • arjunp2085 - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link

    Is this not a bit ODD to Compare a $260 to a Lowly Under performing [B}$173 CPU... Geezs This is Grossly inaccurate

    Think about the BOOST to Post Processing and It differs a Whole Lot to the Post processing capability
  • Strid - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link

    Yeah, it would have made more sense, IMO, to use lower end processors like AMD 4850E or Intel E5200/7200 which is what most people would use in a HTPC.

    But if you want to do encoding on your HTPC also, I can see the need for a quad core. But not for your average "movie box".
  • Staples - Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - link

    Really, this thing came out like 6 months ago it seems and finally we get some video benchmarks on anandtech. I know it has been commented that it did not work right for months because the video drivers were terrible but I can not believe it really took that long. When I had to get a HTPC, I just bought an Athlon BE and a 780G board. Much cheaper and adequate. Which in hindsight the P45 may have performed better, an Intel CPU and a Core 2 CPU would have driven the price up quite a bit.
  • Kreed - Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - link

    Gary, what are you hinting at with the following statement?

    "That leaves the Intel G45. If you are an Intel fan, this is your only real IGP choice... for the next few days at least."

    Are you suggesting that Intel might be releasing a new IGP over the
  • Kreed - Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - link

    Oops, i didn't get to finish the comment. Here's the comment in full:

    Gary, what are you hinting at with the following statement?

    "That leaves the Intel G45. If you are an Intel fan, this is your only real IGP choice... for the next few days at least."

    Are you suggesting that Intel might be releasing a new IGP over the next few days?
  • Strid - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link

    The NVIDIA MCP7A (GeForce 9300/9400 IGP) boards supposedly launches today. They're sockey 775 boards. I'm pretty sure AnandTech will have a review up soon.

    http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...">http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...
  • GPGPUman - Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - link

    AMD 780G and 790GX have 8 stream processors (5-way) for a total of 40 possible ops per clock... NOT 10

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now