It’s a healthy obsession, tuning your system for maximum power savings. I have been doing that for about the last 5 years and I have never encountered anything like my current rig.

After doing some reading about the supposedly remarkable power/performance of the new Intel Core processors I recently offloaded a lot of power hungry AMD computers that generated a lot of heat if not noise and exchanged them all for a new Intel Core Duo system.

This means in my case about 3x the performance at only 60-75% of the power. Seriously these Core Duo systems with onboard video are amazing.

My old single cpu AMD system idled at 80 watts. The new dual core system does 57 watts.

I needed dual screens, and the Shuttle SG31 G2-BK provides two video out jacks. The onboard video controller permits extending your desktop across two monitors which is how I work- one IDE screen and one everything else. This is a huge power savings having such a video system built into the motherboard, and it isn’t that short on 3d capabilities either if you are into high end games which these days I’m not.

Performance on compiling code is incredibly good with my E6400 CPU with 4MB of L2 Cache. I never have seen a cache of that size on a CPU and that was the selling point, and it turns out to have been a great choice and a very fair price.