That is definitely true and why I compared idle watts. That Athlon uses the same idle watts as modern mobile CPUs. So no reason to replace during the mostly idle times. Spot on. I can't have this system off during idle time as it wouldn't come up to fulfill its purpose fast enough when needed and it would be a pain to trigger that anyway (I mean, really, port knocking to start up that system type thing). Else I would. That I do do with the HTPC which has a more modern Intel core i3.
The "nothing" here was exactly meant more for the times when it does have to do something. But even then at 45W TDP, as long as it's able to do what it needs to, then the newer CPUs have no real edge. What they gain in performance due to multi core they loose in being essentially equivalent single core performance for what that machine does: HTPC file serving, email server etc.
