So after annoying some friends today they told me to ask people who might actually know what to do.

I currently have two systems - I did have 3, but the scraptop went in the bin.

1) I have a system with a Pheonm 2 x4 965BE 3.4GHZ cpu that I've had a couple of years and it's great, but it uses too much power. The tdp is 145w and it uses nearly 200w rendering video.

I had thought about down-clocking it as for everyday stuff running it at 2.6GHZ does not degrade general performance too much, but whether it's using less power I don't know. Cool and quiet drops it to 800mhz idle. I'm not sure if it can be run on two cores to use less power.

My motherboard is AM3+ so I'm thinking of getting a bulldozer FX4100 for use with Linux preferably as the tdp is 95w. Anyone have experience of the power use of this chip?

2) I've got an E-350 dual core system that is good till you hit 720 + video in Linux - I think it works with Windows but have not had the energy to do this test. I have a contour roam so I need HD video to work. (Driver issues I thought were fixed or that's what I guess)

But then I thought... the e-350 board has space for a video card, so why not put the e-350 board in my full sized atx tower case and use the graphics card I know works with Linux in the machine. I've not done this yet as I have a giant zalman cooler on the am3 board and it has a 500w psu


  • So what would you do? I'm trying to keep the power use of the computer down and need to be able to render at least 720p video (1080p preferred) while getting back to owning 1 'main' computer.



Thanks for any advice. I'm leaning toward ebaying the e-350 machine and getting the bulldozer.