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Looking at some of the rigs various people have made it appears that AMD setups use roughly 200 watts more power from the wall. Is there any real proof that AMD setups do use more power from the wall? Thanks.

I'm a loyal AMD fan and have been for a long time, so I cannot say power draw for intel.  However with my setup at idle draws 110w (2x7950's & sempron 145).  Near  as I can calculate, the board itself is drawing 65w or so.  MFG's don't generally report Mobo draw, so I imagine this can vary considerably with builds.

Not all computers are equal. Are you talking about a minimalist mining-only rig with a weak cut down processor, or a raging beastmonster that can multitask a billion and one things without breaking a sweat? Are you talking about at completely idle levels, under mining load, under full load from mining/surfing/gaming/etc?

Check hardware review sites, they usually have most of this info down, depending on whatever criteria it is you're looking for.

With a minimal processor, I would imagine both intel and AMD have competitive offerings on the low-power front.

The AMD sempron is a great choice for low-end low-power work that requires motherboards with slot flexibility. The intel atom does have it beat for power consumption, but you can't drop an intel atom into any motherboard.

I have AMD sempron systems that draw ~85 watts at idle (including gpu idle power usage).

From experince intel will "destroy" amd when it comes to low cpu load powerdraw, especially if you go with socket 1155. We are talking about 20-30W difference at the extremes here though so price is more of a factor.

Id say the low tier intels use less power then the low tier amds, but not by much.

Considering the TDW of the cheapest amd semperon is 45W, there's not much of difference that an intel processor can make. The maximum power savings is definitely less than 15W per processor.

One of my rigs runs an i5-3350P, which is a 69W CPU.  According to the Asus EPU software, the chip is using 22-23W running 7 threads of Litecoin mining and the other thread left to run the two GPUs that are mining Bitcoins.

My other machines all use Sandy Bridge Celerons, which do nothing only run Windows to satisfy the GPUs, they're running a 1.6GHz with the core voltage lowered.  They're running sub 10W at my estimation.

AMD is only competitive when you go to the Turion, IMHO.

Less than 50w idle power usage is achievable on an AMD system if you have a motherboard that allows undervolting. Lower the CPU NB and HT clocks, then lower the CPU and CPU-NB voltages. My Athlon x4 620 can function at 1.175v core (2.6Ghz) and CPU-NB at 1.025v (1.6GHz) without problems, enable all power saving features and you will see a lot of difference. My Athlon 170 also ran fine at 0.975v even if unlocked to dual core. If you dont run any cpu intensive tasks, you can lower the voltages a bit more. The power draw will also depend on what motherboard you are using. For FM2 processors, get a Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 (http://F2A85X-UP4) motherboard.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6511/gigabyte-f2a85xup4-review-are-powirstages-needed-with-trinity/4