Last week I wrote about Windows 10, and about hardware. Well, concerning a full Windows 10 upgrade / installation, Mitchie beat me – she got hers today, for free as promised. And, just like Microsoft’s Andre da Costa promised in his article, the upgrade even left Mitchie’s Ubuntu boot loader unaffected. Perfect.
I decided to upgrade my PC first, and as much as I’d have loved to build the mentioned Quad Core recommendation from the German c’t magazine, their whole rig just wouldn’t have fitted into my somewhat cramped space. That’s why I finally thought about replacing their mainboard suggestion, an Asus Z97-A (ATX size) to a smaller but almost similiar one, the Asus Z97-M Plus (µATX size), and to keep my current Antec 2480 HTPC case which fits perfectly. So I started ordering what was needed, and the first stuff arrived today. Like the CPU:
Intel Core i5 Processor (i5-4460 boxed)
This is a middle of the road current generation quad core processor from Intel. Not the fastest or newest or most expensive one, but the one with the best price/performance ratio on the market today. It is rated with 84W power consumption at full power, with the integrated graphics core also on full power, which is about correct – the guys from c’t measured 85W for the full machine on full steam.
To compare: my current 45nm ‘Yorkfield’ Core 2 Duo Q8400 is rated with 95W, about 10W more than this newer 22nm ‘Haswell’ chip.
But what is much more important is that ca. 98% of the time we use our PCs, they are waiting for us, not vice versa. So the real interesting value is the power they draw when idle (when they have nothing to do than just to wait for us). And that, for the whole machine running a Windows desktop was measured with 16W, on Linux it was even 2-3 Watts lower than that. And this is laptop territory, folks. Which is also the reason you won’t hear much of these machines.
I won’t reach these numbers exactly because I didn’t order the recommended power supply – my Antec case has a 380W PSU built into it. But still I’ll make a jump up performance-wise, with using less power than before.
My current hardware which runs just fine will go to my brother’s, because it’s still better than what he has now. And I’ll take some more pictures of the current and new build once I’m starting, even if it’s only for the wiring to the connectors and such. If it’s interesting enough to post these here, just let me know. Building your own PCs is fun…
Thanks for reading.