Anyway, the i7-3770K is only slightly faster than the i7-3770T but much more energy hungry. So I took the risk and ordered an i7-3770T from a German shop, fingers crossed.

Is any DDR3-1600 memory at 8GB better than others?

If power consumption is a concern you might want to look at low voltage RAM, like Kingston's HyperX LoVo or any other RAM that confirms with the JEDEC specification DDR3L.

Does this work immediately or must you set any jumpers on the mobo?

Also, how much does its wattage differ from other DDR3-1600 options? 32GB will probably be installed.

It should work immediately. I personally have never used low voltage RAM, so I cant give you data on that. May be this can give you an idea about what we are talking here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...er,2650-7.html
Keep in mind that this article is from 2010, it may be that power efficiency is better nowadays.

If LoVo saves up to 3W at 4GB, what should it save at 32GB?

Or is it the number of sticks that matters, not the GB, as this psu calculator seems to think?

I would rather think that it is the number of sticks that matters, not the GB.
Of course, not having RAM will save the most amount of power, so if you in fact only need 16GB for your workload, putting in 32GB will be a greater waste of power as you can get back with using LoVo RAM. Same of course with the SSDs/RevoDrive and any other component in the system. If you don't need the speed of several SSDs or the revodrive then you will get the best powersave effect (and money saving also) if you simply don't use them.
To really get the most out of it you should run a test system to evaluate your workload.

Not a paradox at all. Noctua knows what they are doing with fans.

Yes. You need a 2.5'' to 3.5'' adapter for them to fit securely in most cases.

You cant get 2.5'' HDD bigger than 2.0TB currently.

GA-Q77M-D2H seems to have some over/underclocking options. How well they would work is beyond me, Q77 chipsets arent made for over/underclocking.

'Slightly faster' from a passmark forum admin.....and appling what he is saying to your situation could be wrong (and to be truthful 'David (PassMark)' is wrong, or at least misleading as well).

i7-3770K- 2.5GHz, 3.7GHz turbo.
i7-3770T- 3.5GHz, 3.9GHz turbo.

If you only care about single core preformance/max turbo speed, yes, the i7-3770T is only 'slightly faster'.

If you have several cores under load, the i7-3770K is up to 40-50% faster.

You seem to be happy enough to accept advice from a forum as long as it agrees with your ideas.

Even if you find an online review that doesnt mean its accurate. Like I said earlier, payola is everywhere.

I cant 100% remember right now but IIRC tomshardware uses 'power consumption from the wall' method (i.e. doesnt count the inefficiency of the PSU).

IMO the difference in real system power consumption between the lovo sticks and normal sitcks is less than the tomshardware numbers could lead you to believe.

Xbitlabs uses an 'after the PSU power consumption' method which is more accurate IMO-

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mem...vo-hyperx.html

Still, provided they run with ivybidge (havent checked, I'd guess they should) and arent to expensive its not a bad idea..even saying 2-6watts is a bonus.

Risking with a cpu that needs underclocking and without knowing if the mobo's underclocking was sufficient, this seemed too much of a risk.

And by the way, the single-threaded test is on a separate page here, where the i7-3770K is 5% faster. The multi-threaded test is here, where the i7-3770K is only 10% faster. The passmark tests are multi-threaded according to this.

Regarding Kingston LoVo, page 3 of the test site says: "Many mainboards, such as Gigabyte ones, for instance, can’t set such low voltages. At least not without the special BIOS modifications." How do we find out if the BIOS of the motherboard has settings for LoVo memory?

Found the motherboard's manual here, it says something about memory voltage. Here's the critical part from pages 29 to 30:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...2&d=1352416225

Is DDR3L definitely supported?

The core i7 3770 has more virtual machine support.

Kingston DDR3L is available in CL9 and CL10 latencies, where the former is 50% more expensive. Is it worth it?

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You dont even know if you 'need' a i7-3770T or the lower TDP/max power consumption benfits.

Do you have any idea what passmark is and how it works?

It is in no way a benchmarking compariosn system. You cant use it as a benchmark.

Pasmark is d/l and run on whatever hrdware the user has. For any single CPU, you can have various different RAM sizes, speeds, CAS ratings, chipsets, HDDs/SSDs, video cards (or not) etc..

Given enough samples, it gives at best a rough guide.

i7-3770T- 3 samples. Statistically insignificant.

I'm not suprised taht there are so few i7-3770T passmark results, its an very uncommon and hard to find CPU.

Even if you believe that 3 samples is statistically significant, and the variance in testing systems doesnt matter, that doesnt mean that passmark is doing a good job on measuring multicore performance.

While I cant find any decent test on the i7-3770T, more than 10% difference between the the i7-3770T and i7-3770K would be in line with results I've seen for other lower power Intel CPUs. I'd gues than on average it would be 10-20% and I believe than in the right circumstances it would be as high as 40-50%.

If you want to believe legionhardware tests becuase they fit with your conceptions, or use passmark to show performance differences without understanding how passmark works, that is up to you.

One has to start somewhere and the only available place for me was google with the words "benchmark" or "score", for any recommended cpu. There is no pre-conception at all.

Is there something about virtualization that is not said at intel's pages about this cpu? Intel's comparison tool shows these results:

http://ark.intel.com/compare/65523,65719,65525

From this comparison it seems that the 3770T has all the features of the 3770, except one: "embedded options". It's probably an underclocked 3770. Whereas the 3770K is missing some virtualization features that the other two have.

In the future, if even higher storage performance is required, what sort of gain do you expect from software raid-0 with a second revo drive?

Assuming it will work on the gpu's pcie x16 slot, is that correct?