Intel board - Hitachi vs Seagate HD

Ok, the ASUS bug has bitten.

I am going to buy a Z70 refreshed system but an curious about which HD and CPU to put into it. I am considering the 1.86 Ghz processor but am concerned as to temperature and battery conditions. I know the refreshed really hasn't had time to be reviewed but in the Z70 do you think there is a benefit to go to a 1.7 or any loss in batter/temp conditions to go up to 2 GHz. As for the HD I like the faster HD idea but do you think I will gain alot of heat and loss a lot of batter time compared to the 5400? As an aside besides these two companies what HD do you recommend for my proposed system?

 

A CPU with max rated speed of 1.86 will not be running at that speed all the time. Intel's 'Stepspeed' technology makes the CPU frequency will only reach maximum if you're at 100% utilisation. Unless you're deliberately doing it (benchmarking, running distributed computing project, stress testing/"burn in" programs etc) it's hard to hit a sustained 100% CPU utilisation for long.

Most of the time, the processor will be sitting comfortably at 800Mhz (Sonoma generation; 600Mhz for Banias/Dothan), so in real world usage you're unlikely to observe temp diffs between the processors.

IIRC, Seagate are the only ones with 7200RPM 2.5" drives, and a review of their power consumption specs seems to suggest they're not any more power hungry than 5400 drives - around 2.4 to 2.6 watts read/write/seek and closer to 2 watts idle. Assuming equal heat losses (there's no reason to assume otherwise) they should be on par with 5400 drives for battery life. They ARE however more susceptible to shock - both operating and non-operating.