TDP vs Wattage and power usage

[idata]

Hello everyone,

This is a question I've had for a long time. I'm trying to build a power efficient Pentium 4 or celeron machine.

There's a chip, the SL668 that has a TDP of 38 watts. Meanwhile, the SL5TJ has a TDP of about 58 watts but has half of the L2 cache and is .1ghz slower.

I don't understand how that could be. Also, what does TDP and Wattage have in common?

What's a good way to gauge the power consumption of a processor?iu

[idata · Accepted solution]

The thermal design power is the amount of heat the fan needs to be able to dissipate. Each manufacturer announces the TDP for each Processor based on their ruling.

Regarding wattage, each motherboard should have the power supply requirements which includes the diagnose of how much wattage he is going to need with a basic system configuration and since the processor is part of the system configuration, the motherboards manufacturers already take into consideration the power consumption of the processor/fan.