New Computer Uses Less Than Half the Power
 

I just thought I would showcase the upgrade that I did this last month to cut my computer power use to less than half of what it was before.

The original system:

Athlon XP3000
Asus A7N8X Deluxe
512MB ddr
Dual Maxtor 160GB 7200rpm 8MB drives RAID-0
Panasonic DVD-R
GeForce4
Enermax 350W PS
17" LCD monitor


The new system:

Intel BOXD945GCLF2 Atom 330 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
2GB DDR2 667
Single Seagate 250GB 7200rpm 16MB SATA 3.0
Panasonic DVD-R
Onboard Intel GMA 950 Graphics
Enermax 350W PS
17" LCD


The original system sucked down 175W just at idle and peaked at 220W under hard use. The new system goes from 82W at idle to just over 90W under heavy load including the monitor - and it's faster. Not by a longshot, but marginally. It certainly multi-tasks better with the dual cores, but much more noticeable is the improvement in hard drive performance. The new drive technology absolutely smokes what the previous RAID could do. And the GMA graphics seem to perform on par with the aged GeForce.

Clearly, the new machine is no gaming or number crunching powerhouse. It is however plenty fast for everything else that I do, noticeably faster in many ways, and more importantly, something I have far less guilt about leaving on all day for streaming radio or tv.

Other highlights are virtually instantaneous sleep mode response going in and coming out, and ultra low power use in that state, plus the entire motherboard is barely larger than a CD case and requires only one fan for the chipset. The CPU heatsink is fanless, and now I don't even run a case fan, letting the power supply handle airflow instead.

Essentially I have built what many are now marketing as a 'Nettop' computer. I think I built mine better for less money however, spending $169 on everything.

Oh, and in case people think I'm silly for swapping out of one computer for one that is barely faster in some respects, the Asus motherboard was becoming increasingly unreliable and needed to go. I should have ditched it 2 years ago when the onboard RAID controller crapped out (which I replaced with a PCI card), but now even the power regulator is in the midst of going as well.

I know I could have gotten more speed for the money, but that wasn't the goal.

What OS did you have, and what OS do you have now?

I think you'll find your speed has improved more than your first impressions show. If you're not doing gaming or heavy graphics rendering, CPU is less important than most people think; what is far more important is quantity of RAM, which you've quadrupled. Also important is hard drive speed, the improvement of which you've already mentioned.

Yup, it was and still is running XP-SP2 and I agree about the RAM. Half a gig just isn't enough for SP2 under normal use. Just going from 512 to 768k on our laptop made a huge difference under SP2.

My amd XM-M2000+ Averatec laptop draws 30 watts - my eeePC 22 watts.

But I can literally put a hamster wheel inside of mine. :P

I finally got a replacement Silenx fan for the noisy stock northbridge fan today, and now unless it is absolutely dead quiet in the house, I can't hear anything from it. It's even quieter than our laptop.

Just out of curiosity, and because the cable/modem service was restored days before the power company restored the electric (service was out for 10 days, 12 hours!), I connected one laptop computer's power to a spare car battery (12 volts) with an inline fuse of 1 amp, pulled the laptop's on board battery and booted up. The 1 amp fuse lasted about 15 seconds before popping. I think the pcmcia wireless card was the last straw. I changed the dead fuse for a 1.5 amp and tried again with success. The current draw for that laptop, with wireless network card, is between 1 and 1.5 amperes. The car battery was actually 13.2 volts with no load. At 1.5 amperes that'd be 19.8 watts. So that laptop is somewhere under 20 watts.
Toshiba Satellite, 40GB, 96 MB, PIII, 133mhz. It's OK, I don't type fast enough to need more speed than that.
Oh! The OS is Win98SE, and that's only because the older OS don't support USB.

I forgot to mention this earlier, but over the summer I bought a new Dell Inspiron laptop with a Core 2 Duo processor. It uses ~ 50 or 60 watts total. I stopped using my Pentium 4 desktop with a 22" CRT monitor. I think that system used 600 - 800 watts total. I'm using about 1/10th of the energy as I was before.

-Jay

those laptops draw a heck of alot of amps, should read the output rating on some of the chargers/wall adapters sometime.(my dell latitude is 4.5 amps)

My Dell power supply says 1.5 amps (60 or 65 watts max I think), which is far less than the P4 desktop with a 22" CRT monitor that I was using.

-Jay

Output amps is at far lower voltage, though.

My HP:
Input - 1.7A@100-240V (200 watts at 115V)
Output - 3.5A@18.5V (65 watts)

It runs fine on a small inverter that I have which is something like 65 to 95 watts (definitely doesn't exceed 100 watts continuous output).

I used to run mine on a 100W inverter in my car, but then I got a great deal on a Dell travel charger on Ebay. I got a Dell PA-12 travel charger with A/C, car, and plane cables for about $30.

-Jay

I have 3 computers.

One is the CNC controller I put together for the gantry mill I'm building so I won't count that one really. Since it isn't getting used much.

One is my desktop, it has a 160watt power supply running XP-SP3. It has 2GB memory, P4-2.4HT, 128MB AGP Radeon X1050, 200GB 7200rpm HDD, and a 19" CRT monitor (love that thing). I need to get a kill-a-watt but I'm sure the system takes no more than 250w when running full, the monitor is rated to 100 watts max.

My laptop is a Sony, P2-366, 192mb, and the hard drive is a 4gb SSD(Solid State Disk) running Windows 2000(MUCH better power management and plug and play device support, when I had to install drivers in 98 just to use my flash drive I was done with it). I don't have a way to measure this system other than battery usage, it'll last a good 2.5 hours with normal use on wifi and the battery is a 14.4v 4400mAH battery. This comes out to 25.3 watts/hr. I know for a fact that the laptop hadn't been used in years when I got it and I have no idea what the actual charge is that the battery will hold. I imagine it's not 4400 anymore.

I don't actually have numbers on the savings I got from going with a solid state disk from the normal laptop hdd but i can tell you that it's MUCH more responsive now. Not having to wait for a disk to spin up saves a lot of time when coming back from suspend and the 10ns seek time as opposed to 10ms does a lot in an OS like windows that uses many small files. The laptop isn't much for processor or memory but for casual browsing, writing papers, and data logging it works well, not to mention the fact that I can go the full 2.5 hours without the cooling fan ever coming on.

The power bricks supplied with laptops are sized to power the computer, all peripherals and drives (optical mice, USB ports, CD, floppy, hard drive) simultaneously while also charging the laptop's battery in a reasonable period of time. The supplied brick's output capacity usually far exceeds the needs of the computer alone.
That laptop about which I posted had no power block when I bought it ($40 E-bay), but I was able to get a compatible jack installed on a 12v, 1.5amp output wall unit from a cordless phone. It takes nearly 4 hrs to recharge each hour of battery-only use if the laptop is left running, or about a 1:1 ratio with the laptop turned off.

re: Win 98 flash drivers. I found a universal USB driver on line that has yet to NOT be able to run anything. Cameras, memory sticks, traditional drives, hubs... It doesn't support highspeed USB2, nor does Win98 support the U3 technology, but the files (not the programs) are there to import/export.
For any other Luddites that refuse to enter the brave new world of 32 bit OS just to use every USB device, here's the link:
https://www.wintricks.it/faq/usbpen98.html
It's in Italian, but the pictures and images are understandable.

I just remembered, I hooked up an ammeter to the power cable going to some large servers I've got at work...~1 amp at idle.

... at "Watt" voltage?

Standard US AC ~115v.

As a general rule amps x volts = watts. Its not exact, but gives you a real close guestimate.

-Jay

I thought it was the hard-and-fast rule, not a general rule of thumb that gets you close...I thought watts was specifically the expression of amps * volts. What other variables are involved?

I don't remember exactly. My dad explained it to me once, but he lost me fairly quickly. He holds degrees in electrical and nuclear engineering. amps * volts is good enough for most applications, but there was a more detailed way to do it that he did. I remember I asked him once and he started to explain it to me, but when he realized I was getting lost he told me to just multiply the amps by the volts...

-Jay

Yeah, AC power gets technical, with power factors and crap.

I just ordered up a "low power" 45W AMD X2 CPU, with power saving features... but I'm prolly gonna make it suck a few watts more, muhuhahahaaaa.

Though actually it will probably end up a good few watts below what the 125W top of the line screamer does, when I'm getting the same ooomph out of it.

I actually stumbled upon a great way to improve my battery life with my laptop.

Remote Desktop. I connect to my home computer that is on 24/7 anyways and that keeps my laptop from using its drive or processor much at all. I got 3.5 hours off my last charge doing that rather than letting the little P2-366 render webpages and such(it's honestly a little faster that way too since the P4 at home renders everything).

and I doubled the fuel economy of my car by leaving it in neutral with the engine running and towing it with a 3/4 ton truck..:rolleyes:
Use the desktop OR the laptop. Using both uses more power than using the greater consumer of the two.