Very low power PC?

M

me

Id like to give a try at building my own PC

However.... I'm wanting something very low power
consumption as I intend to leave the PC on 24/7.

Is it even possible to have a low power desktop PC?

Not much utility in a PC that one has to turn off/on
whenever needing to use it at home.... in my opinion.

Also... may want to leave it on 24/7 to act as a PVR
 
J

John Doe

Id like to give a try at building my own PC

However.... I'm wanting something very low power
consumption as I intend to leave the PC on 24/7.
Is it even possible to have a low power desktop PC?
Click to expand...

Probably not if you want to use it for serious gaming.

Integrated components such as sound, video, and modem/LAN probably
are lower power. They are usually lower performance too.
Not much utility in a PC that one has to turn off/on
whenever needing to use it at home.... in my opinion.
Click to expand...

Leave it on except turn it off at night? Use a CPU idling program?
Try power management?
 
J

John Doe

Not much utility in a PC that one has to turn off/on
whenever needing to use it at home.... in my opinion.
Click to expand...

Of course that really depends on the details of your usage.

I forgot to mention windows XP includes something called
"hibernation". You probably are not always connected to the
Internet, like an Internet instant messaging program, so you could
use that I suppose.

If I were you, I might tailor my search towards achieving that end.
It is a challenge, others might have better advice (maybe in other
groups too), I gave up using power management or anything like
hibernation a long time ago (except for the monitor and hard disk
drive). You will definitely want to use the most recent operating
system.

Seems to me that otherwise you would go with a notebook PC.

Good luck.
 
M

me

Leave it on except turn it off at night? Use a CPU idling program?
Try power management?
Click to expand...

yreah I know I can do all that

but was curious if there are some low power
components... CPU, etc.... one can use to "design in"
low power efficiency
 
M

me

Seems to me that otherwise you would go with a notebook PC.

yeah that may be a better option really
 
M

me

I gave up using power management or anything like
hibernation a long time ago (except for the monitor and hard disk
drive)
Click to expand...

Curious as to why you gave it up?

Too much hassle to setup? Didn't work as expected?
 
T

Tweek

It will be spendy and choices of MBD are limited, but you can build a
Pentium-M based desktop.
 
J

John Doe

Curious as to why you gave it up?
Too much hassle to setup? Didn't work as expected?
Click to expand...

Did not work as expected. Seems to me that Microsoft has had a
difficult time coordinating its operating system efforts with
mainboard maker's efforts. Others may have other experiences.

Over time the technology becomes more efficient for the same speed,
but still the higher the power the faster the system (and vice
versa).

If you don't like waiting for Windows to boot, see if hibernation
will work. I would be interested to know whether it works for you.
Maybe you can test it on your current system. Whatever, please let
us know how it goes.

Good luck.
 
P

petermcmillan_uk

Id like to give a try at building my own PC

However.... I'm wanting something very low power
consumption as I intend to leave the PC on 24/7.

Is it even possible to have a low power desktop PC?

Not much utility in a PC that one has to turn off/on
whenever needing to use it at home.... in my opinion.

Also... may want to leave it on 24/7 to act as a PVR
Click to expand...

Get a Via C3 machine. I got a barebones shuttle system with a 1GHz
Nehemiah processor onboard. It has built in sound, graphics, LAN,
firewire, and USB. It's in a small Ali case, which looks amazing, and
was £130 from overclockersUK. Just had a look though, and they seem
to have stopped doing it.

The 1GHz CPU I had has a max power consumption of about 18W, whereas
other modern processors are all over 50W. They do some slower
processors which are even cooler though, and you can get them in the
mini-itx (very small) form factor. Some of these are now available on
ebuyer, but are relatively expensive becaue of their size.

The performance of these CPUs isn't like Athlons or Pentiums, but I
haven't found much difference between my 1GHz C3, and my Athlon XP
1700+. The FPU is supposed to be rubbish, and it does seem to take a
long time for compression and decompression (such as zip files). The
other cores (non-Nehemiah) have a half speed FPU which makes them even
worse. I've added a PCI Geforce 4 MX440 to my C3 machine, and it can
play Counterstrike at a high resolution with no problems. In fact it
matched my Athlon XP 1700+ with a similar graphics car, but with the
APG verion. For some strange reason the CPU usage seems to be
approxamately half on the C3, than the XP. It's only at 22% while
running Counterstrike, so Counterstrike obviously isn't CPU intensive.

I'm not sure what a PVR is. These kind of machines would be ideal for
something like a file server though. There's loads of mini-itx stuff
available at mini-itx.com
 
P

philo

Id like to give a try at building my own PC

However.... I'm wanting something very low power
consumption as I intend to leave the PC on 24/7.

Is it even possible to have a low power desktop PC?

Not much utility in a PC that one has to turn off/on
whenever needing to use it at home.... in my opinion.

Also... may want to leave it on 24/7 to act as a PVR
Click to expand...


I recently did a power-consumption test on a P-II-300mhz
and found that in idle it only drew 50 watts!
Under full cpu load it was perhaps 100 or so
 
C

Conor

Did not work as expected. Seems to me that Microsoft has had a
difficult time coordinating its operating system efforts with
mainboard maker's efforts. Others may have other experiences.
Click to expand...
It isn't Microsoft that has the issues, its the hardware driver
writers.
 
C

Conor

yreah I know I can do all that

but was curious if there are some low power
components... CPU, etc.... one can use to "design in"
low power efficiency
Click to expand...
Absolutely. Use mobile CPUs. Use slower CPUs. Use RAM instead of a HDD.
 
N

None

Did not work as expected. Seems to me that Microsoft has had a
difficult time coordinating its operating system efforts with
mainboard maker's efforts. Others may have other experiences.
Click to expand...


I also have had problems with hibernation and standby modes in Windows. The
difficulties that I experienced were mostly related to Internet
connectivity after the PC came out of those modes. A reboot was needed to
solve the problem.
 
P

petermcmillan_uk

philo said:
I recently did a power-consumption test on a P-II-300mhz
and found that in idle it only drew 50 watts!
Under full cpu load it was perhaps 100 or so
Click to expand...

Is that the power of the whole computer? A PII-300MHz is probably less
than 20W max.
 
P

petermcmillan_uk

Conor said:
Absolutely. Use mobile CPUs. Use slower CPUs. Use RAM instead of a
Click to expand...
HDD.

The Althon mobile XP's have a very low power rating, and are unlocked
so can be underclocked to be even cooler.
 

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