On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, William Harrington wrote:
I think it is very possible for you to get a system that runs between 100-150W! Especially with those pentium-m cpus. You'll get nice speed and low power consumption from those.
Actually, if you can still get an agp mobo, and use a low-spec graphics card (e.g. old radeon 7500, or 9200se), that figure is very do-able (except, perhaps, on P4). I measured the following consumptions a few months ago for my desktop boxes:
1 GHz duron, 512 MB PC100, matrox G400, 40 GB seagate 7200rpm 77-92 Watts (highest load is playing a DVD)
2 GHz winchester athlon64, 1 GB PC3200, radeon 9200se, 80 GB samsung 57-86 Watts (playing a DVD is 65 Watts, the high loads are extracting tarballs and compiling) - yes, this is faster and mostly uses a bit less power (it drops back to 1GHz for low loads).
2.4 GHz San Diego athlon 64 on the above mobo - I don't have the full figures from this, but a minimum of 67 Watts (Cool'n'Quiet in the bios doesn't recognise this cpu), maximum of about 100 Watts.
1.8 GHz G5 SMU powermac, with the nasty standard nvidia graphics and 80 GB drive, 1.25GB PC3200, windfarm driver - 107 Watts at low speed, 125 Watts at full speed.
Of course, a geode would be an order of magnitude less, but I wouldn't fancy doing development on it.
Certainly, the Pentium M looks good for a 32-bit machine, particularly with DDR2 memory which is supposed to use less power, but it's easy to blow the power budget with a careless decision, e.g. on graphics cards. In AMD land, winchester and venice cores are cool, but it can be a hassle to find an agp mobo that boots with venice (unless you are into bios updates), and you need to ensure it is set up for CnQ in the bios.
Just for comparison, my set-top-box from NTL (cable TV and broadband) uses about 77 Watts fully on, or 76 Watts in standby!
Ken -- das eine Mal als Trag?die, das andere Mal als Farce
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