CavesOfTQLT Wrote: > Maybe so but with a system that's running 24/7 you want it to consume as > little juice as is possible, if not for pennies sake but for the > environment...
One justification for this for me would be power consumption. Currently I'm running SS on a P4 system, very power hungry. I'd still be using it all day long, but at night I could shut it off and let a low-power SS server run so that it could wake me up in the morning (I use an SB2 as an alarm clock). There are lots of peak power calculators out there, but I'm looking for idle power figures. Unfortunately these are very hard to find. The best one I saw was this: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/computer-power-consumption.html I assumed my P4 system was like his P4 system in the Boxes section near the bottom, but mine is newer/faster and has 3 discs, so I conservatively assumed 80 W idle. A fanless VIA system would be like the last entry in his Boxes section, 16 W, but with one disc at 7.3 W idle, see here: http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200511/SP2504C_6.html. That's a savings of 56.7 W. Now I'd be saving this for 14 h/day (my P4 system would still be running during the day) so that's 0.79 kWh/day. At our power prices of $0.058/kWh, that's only $16.80 per year! Unfortunately this hardly justifies spending $300 just for the motherboard... Amazingly, even with the monitor on ~8 h/day, assuming my 17" CRT draws 60 W, the power costs for my P4 box for an entire year is only $47.42. I do like saving power but I'm also an engineer and I know an uneconomical project when I see one. I may take your advice and use one of my unused older systems though. This would save manufacturing a new one - I've already saved every computer I've come across from the landfill. I have a secondary PC with a 1.2 GHz AMD Duron - I was going to use this in the basement for model railroad use. I still have my first PC with an AMD K6-2 400 MHz processor, and I built a P166 from discarded parts (which ran ClarkConnect 2.2 although quite slowly). My most recent find is a P4A system, unfortunately with the pricey RDRAM gone. However, ADDING another PC that's not plugged in now would just serve to increase my power consumption over what I have right now. I'd have to use it to replace what I'm currently using, and even then the power savings are small. It's too bad. Much like gasoline, although electricity is expensive, it's just not expensive enough to justify spending that much cash. -- Mark Lanctot ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=25892 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
