Intel Patsburg hit by more issues

Now that we finally have gotten past the official launch of Intel's new platform, we thought we'd talk a little bit about the details of Intel's Patsburg chipset, of which the X79 is the first product to arrive in the market. As many of you already knows, Intel's X79 chipset isn't exactly what the company had in mind initially and Intel had to cut back on the feature count not once, but twice. However, the resulting product is little more than a glorified P67 chipset and it doesn't look set to change.

For starters the X79 is a power hog; it has a max TDP of 7.8W which should be compared to 6.1W for the 6-series chipsets. However, Intel's server version which should be the C600 series of chipsets peak at 6.7W. The only reason that we can see for this is some additional features such as extra USB 2.0 ports, a couple of extra PCI Express x1 lanes, native PCI support, a built in Gigabit Ethernet MAC and audio, but these don't seem to account for the extra power draw. What we do know is that the disabled SCU is still part of the chipset and it's using power even though it doesn't offer any functionality..