On the contrary in 2013 the kind of person who builds their own PC's is the only one who likely cares about technical specs. If "good enough" is good enough for you there is very little reason to build your own box these days.
For performance applications on the desktop though, power draw at idle doesn't matter too much. It's all about power draw at load. Power from the wall is cheap and easy to forget about. If I'm building a machine that draws 750W at load, drawing at idle is fairly insignificant. It's laptops where power draw at idle really matters, which are rarely home-built.
I exclusively use server or workstation/server class motherboards from Supermicro or Tyan not just for myself but also for my parents, so I can then largely ignore the hardware for 5+ years plus not worry about non-reproducible errors from radiation flipping a DRAM bit. I've done this since 1995-6 and never had one fail in the field except through an act of God (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado).
For this purpose, decreasing stress from thermal cycling is good.
(Yeah, they're grossly overpowered for what my parents do, but since I'm not including my labor in the cost they really don't cost that much.)
I consider it borderline negligent to use anything other than ECC RAM in any machine where you care about not corrupting your data with a flipped DRAM bit.
Except it's virtually impossible to find a CPU that supports ECC.
I've used ECC in every one of my machines for the last decade or so - except for the very last once since it's was impossible to get without spending a crazy amount of money (xeon processor).
The low end E3 Xeons (-1220, -1230) are actually rather competitively priced versus the i5 / i7. However this still requires use of a workstation / server motherboard for ECC support.
It's not virtually impossible. It may be virtually impossible in crappy cheap boards from Taiwan, but if you're buying cheap parts then you're likely not making money off the results that you're producing.
At the moment, the second fastest Xeon E3 (of those with integrated graphics) is $15 cheaper than the equivalent i7. They're not price-competitive with the i5s (which lack HyperThreading), but the E3 processors have been very competitive with the i7s since their introduction. The only downside is they don't get put on sale the way the overclockable consumer parts do, and they aren't widely known.
On the contrary to your contrary: the kind of person who builds their PC is the kind who customizes how it works when they're using it. There's no automatic assumption that they also harbor green feelings and want lower power consumption for idle/sleep.
Hell, many are proud of their beefy 1kW+ power supplies and the ridiculous power load they draw.
Others are proud of their energy-destroying bit-coin mining setups.
You certainly can't assume that the home builder cares at all about power consumption.
That CPU won't be appreciably more power efficient than a standard i7-3770. It just constrains its clock speeds in order to stay within a lower power ceiling.
TDP is all about cooling capacity and PSU capabilities. If you're worried about saving energy, get the processor that will run at the highest speed while computing so that it can get back into power-saving mode sooner. And you can always under-clock the standard desktop CPUs if you really want to - a 3770 can be configured to behave pretty much like a 3770T by tweaking the base and Turbo multipliers.
Fair enough. On the other hand segments of the market who think of the computer as a blackbox that is a bicycle for the mind are even less likely to care about any individual specification. Most people I know who build their own PC's are trying to optimize for some spec that manufacturers dont usually care about - loudness, gpu performance, low power draw, size, aesthetics.
On the other hand, you can't automatically assume they don't care about it at all.
I build most of my desktops, and I certainly want to reduce power usage when I'm not using them. Enough so that I'd pay for a power supply that supports the lower power states.
Not everybody who builds their own PC is doing so to make a ridiculously over powered system.
I agree. It really depends on why someone is building the PC. Sometimes you want to optimize the gaming performance, or video editing performance, or the file transfer speed and lower latency for a NAS box, or other times you're looking to optimize video playback, low power consumption, and low noise on an HTPC. All of those could be built by ones self, and each will usually require certain choices and trade-offs to achieve the desired goals.
