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When you look at the fastest processors, Intel’s current TDP is 60-70W while AMD is up around 90W. This is considerably higher than the 29W demanded by a 1GHz Pentium III or the 31W that you need to keep a mobile 2.16GHz Core Duo happy but the key thing is that the latest processors don’t require us to shell out for new power supplies and neither do they make ridiculous demands on the cooling inside your PC. Indeed, if you rebuild your existing PC with a Core 2 Duo motherboard and processor I confidently predict that you will be able to disconnect any case fans that you currently employ.

Intel is delivering faster processors that draw less power, and now that it’s back in the desktop game AMD has responded by cutting its prices to such an extent that Athlon 64 has returned to the Value sector. Hurrah and treble scotches all round.

The fly in the ointment is the graphics market as both ATI and nVidia are busy ramping up the transistor count in their GPUs. As a consequence these chips draw heaps of power and need loads of cooling, which cooks the inside of your PC and makes far too much noise. In the mid-range you can get a passively cooled GeForce 7600GT for less than £150, which is surprisingly good for gaming but if you want to get the most out of your 30in Apple Cinema display you’ll be looking for a Radeon X1900 XTX or GeForce 7900 GTX or, God help you, a pair of them in CrossFire/SLI.

In the eight years between DirectX 6 and DirectX 9 the transistor count in a high-end GPU has shot up from 15 million to 278 million for GeForce 7900 GTX or 384 million for Radeon X1900 XTX. There’s no denying that a modern GPU has a long list of features and capabilities that exceed anything that we could have hoped for in 1998 but the power draw is absolutely outrageous. At every turn the graphics companies have taken a long hard look at the specification of the prevailing graphics interface and then driven a coach and horses through it by using supplementary connectors that deliver extra power. AGP supplied 25W and PCI Express can handle 75W, so the 100W draw of GeForce 7900 GTX and the 150W of Radeon X1900 XTX over-steps the mark by a considerable amount.

That’s how things stand at present, but the situation is likely to get worse when ATI and nVidia unveil their DirectX 10/Shader Model 4 GPUs. The rumour is that nVidia’s G80 will kick things off with a draw of 175W and then ATI will go for broke with the R600 which will break the 200W barrier. In other words, as we save 20W or 30W at the CPU we’ll be losing 50-100W at the GPU. We’ll also have to hand over a substantial amount of money for a new power supply rated at 1000W or 1200W and it’s hard to see how these new graphics cards will avoid excessive amounts of heat and noise.

Of course I want to see how these new chips perform and I positively can’t wait to play Crysis but I’m not prepared to write a blank cheque for ATI or nVidia and truth be told I’d appreciate some help from them in reducing my extortionate power bill instead of making matters worse.

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