AMD's Turion 64 on the Desktop

Toasty16 writes "SPCR has an overview of using an AMD Turion 64 mobile processor in a desktop system. There's a good bit of info about motherboard compatibility and power consumption as compared to a Pentium M processor. There's also links to articles from the Techreport and LaptopLogic on the same topic. If you've been thinking about building a low power HTPC or file server, mobile processor on desktop is an interesting option."

Comments

neato-keen

[eekygeeky]

I love the idea of low power, high-concept CPUs on desktop machines.

I love the fact that these chips are 754 pin and thus compatible with an existing socket- motherboard manufacturers won't have to ramp up any new hardware to start selling boards for these in every color of the rainbow.

Turion Shuttles/insert small FF MB here/, anyone?

and there are loads of legacy boards available. Socket 754 boards are dirt cheap. here's a handy list of compatibles from the article:

http://angelfall.s39.xrea.com/area2ch/turion-e.htm l

I would have jumped all over the P M, except there was no desktop gear for it; unless I bought a notebook PC and did some expensive hacking, which, ad publicae geekio, is a contradiction in terms.

score +one for AMD.

Re:Energy Savings - why not turn it off?

[pgfault]

For those who have a domain name and IP bound to there home systems, they're probably running 365/7. Minimizing the power consumption with a mobile CPU is a good start, as the article points out. There are other avenues for power reduction: do you really need that GeForce 7800? If so, can it be powered off when not in use? How about those 15000rpm mirrored disks? Perhaps 4200rpm is a bit slow, so you have to make tradeoffs. There are plenty of compromises that can be made in building such a system. It appears from the article that the tradeoff in the CPU department isn't really in performance, as the Turion 64 appears to perform on par with its non-mobile siblings, so it's probably in the price difference.

For some, a savings of 50-60W over the course of 3 years may pay for itself.

Have had a good experience with Turion 64

[BigTimOBrien]

I've had a great experience with Turion 64 chips in a laptop. High frame rate on graphics-intensive applications and, in general, good responsiveness even when running a whole boat load of RAM and CPU-heavy apps like Eclipse and Server JVM. I've used these chips from the ML-26 to the ML-44, and the cost/benefit analysis of AMD Turions versus the alternative just makes more sense. For the dollar, it seems like I can get 30% more performance in the apps I care to run.

But, Turion 64 on a desktop, not quite so fast, if performance is important to you, why go to all the trouble to install a mobile CPU? Either turn the thing off at night or drive less.

Re:...or use a Via chip

[kesuki]

i'm pretty sure that in a 'modern' pc all video decoding is handled on the video card. that's why when you try to 'screen grab' you just get a pink or blue image all the decoding is being done by the video card. so as long as you have a gpu capable of decoding HD video, and a media player that supports hardware decoding, the cpu overhead should be pretty low.