Asus Computer
ASUS is a well known computer manufacturer, recognized world wide for its outstanding products addressing not only the rich, but the relatively poor too.
While most ASUS hardware components are very reliable available at fair prices, special technologies only go into pricier products, such as overclocking motherboards and graphics cards.
The so-called secret behind the success of these great graphics cards is the over sized cooler, and high quality capacitors that can supply additional power to the overclocked card when needed.
ASUS motherboards apply a different strategy when overclocking the processor. Yes, motherboards also use very high quality capacitors and you have to install a high performance CPU cooler, but they have two additional elements: TPU and EPU. These are two additional processors are soldered onto the motherboard and their only purpose is to calculate optimal power and performance parameters for the CPU.
For now this technology is available for Intel’s P55 and H57 chipsets, but if consider the improvement these chips bring to overall system efficiency we can almost certainly state that they will be built into motherboards for every type of processor (until they invent something better of course).
According to ASUS these processors improve performance by 37% and save 80% of the electric power. We can all agree on the 37% performance increase, because Intel Core i3 and i5 processors are very good overclockers, but the 80% energy saving smells funny. There are at least two situations in which energy saving cannot be achieved as they say. One is when a workstation, server or gaming computer is always under full load. If the graphics card and the processor (CPU), the components with the biggest power consumption are overclocked and used to the max, then there isn’t any wasted power to reduce. In the other situation the computer system has a very efficient processor and graphics card, so they reduce their power consumption to around 10% anyway, without these two additional smart chips. For example a Radeon 5870 graphics card that needs 25Watts on Idle and 185Watts under full load and any laptop processor (paired up with the help of a special desktop motherboard that accepts laptop processors).
There is one more important thing about ASUS TPU and EPU. The 80% power saving is calculated in the most irrational way in order to maximize the perceived potential of this new technology.
Any rational person, when confronted with these two figures 194Watt and 108Watt, would say that the decrease is 40%, in other words the improvement is less than half of 194Watts.
Don’t get me wrong, 37% performance increase and 40% power savings are still very impressive. So why do you think Intel didn’t implement such a technology into its LGA1156 platform ?
