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Originally Posted by mzemina ziphnor - Not to be a nit, but do you have any technical (with supporting evidence - links would be nice to read through) why you believe this way? |
You mean, apart from the fact that the Pentium D uses almost 4 times(!) as much power at full load ? If that doesnt do it for you, i guess we have very divergent views of the design of a HTPC! (see the previous link to silentpcreview for the numbers). I would say that the important issues for a HTPC is power consumption and noise, both of these are affected by a power hungry CPU such as the pentium D. If you remove those 2 from consideration there are hardly any difference in choosing a normal PC CPU and a CPU for a HTPC system maybe apart from which are best at media de/encoding(but why would a HTPC CPU be working on that, the graphics card in a HTPC should off load it for decoding and the tuner card should handle most of the encoding except archiving to Xvid etc).
Maybe you havent noticed, but even Intel themselves are abandoning the Pentium D type architecture in favor of the Conroe which is in fact based on the Pentium M/Core Solo/Duo architecture.
If you dont like the Core Duo, i think its worthwhile to notice that the AMD A64 (X2) series of CPU's have no problems keeping up performance wise with the Pentium D's while using much less power(and not surprisingly running much cooler).
Hell on the single core side an A64 E6's 3000/3200 is almost guaranteed to undervolt to to 1.1V ( stock -0.3V). At this voltage the CPU heats up so little that its a breeze to cool passively.