But are you going to be foolish enough to risk undervolting the card?

Um, on the high end of the spectrum, a pair of 6-pin PCIe power connectors are still needed. Even with the 970.

They shouldn't bother with XP upgrades, period. Let the dinosaur die already.

You didn't do your research, huh? They're not actually going to go back to Wind'ohs.

It's not that they're fucksticks... Well, no more than usual. The Nexus 5 just doesn't have the frequency bands that Verizon requires for their network. Hardware limitation as opposed to a carrier limitation.

Yeah, except you can't use a Nexus 5 on Verizon to run that portion of the network vs software tests.

True, but that's the point that a I posit. But the way I'd run the experiment would see if carrier bloat has that much of an impact or if it's solely a network/hardware reason for the battery drain.

If you're testing to see if the battery drain is hardware vs network vs software, then it actually is reasonable to have a phone tested that has no Verizon bloatware at all, but still able to access the network. To do it comprehensively, across all 4 major US carriers, you'd need 8 phones. Four of them are carrier stock, no modifications at all, and updated to the most recent carrier approved version of Android. The remaining four are CyanogenMod flashed to the equivilent version that the carrier allows. i.e. the Verizon Stock phone only goes up to 4.3, then the Verizon CM phone gets flashed to the same Android version. At that point, you're able to test to see if carrier bloatware has an effect from any of them and which device lasts regardless.

15% is why. iOS is becoming an irrelevant minority.

I'd like to see what this test looks like with all the phones involved running the same software load. i.e. No Verizon crapware. Just scout out a handset available on all 4 carriers, install Cyanogenmod on one and leave a second one stock. Then we should get a more accurate picture of what's going on here.

That fell apart because Sony didn't anticipate what direction things would take, letting Apple overtake them along with just about everyone else.

No, though Sony could have pulled it out of the fire by partnering with a more respected content vendor, instead of trying to roll their own.

Nor I. If I need GPU performance, I'm always going to go discrete with nVidia hardware. For efficiency, I'll take the i3's that make a joke out of these APUs.

Asus and friends are probably getting bored waiting for AMD to do anything worthwhile period, aside from just releasing new versions of their chipset.

Yeah, set it for 45w max and you end up with the CPU side of it constantly getting throttled and the performance sliding even further into the dirt. But you're right about GPU dependant loads. But if that was my usage case, I'd probably wait for Isis Pro to trickle down to Intel's low-end.