[mythtv-users] Intel/ION Lack of PCI Slots & Mythtv

Greg Cope gregcope at gmail.com
Fri Oct 2 18:59:47 UTC 2009


2009/10/2 Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com>:
> If you're concerned about power consumption, modern processors automatically
> downclock themselves pretty heavily, and with idle spindown of hard drives,
> it should not be difficult to get a system down below 50W consumption when
> idle.  If you want to manually underclock/volt it beyond what the chip
> already does, you can drop it even lower.  Add that you can standby your
> system when not in use, and the power savings of using an Atom/ION system
> drop to a few dollars per year.

Thanks, but it is more subtle than that.

My present system is on 24/7 (webserver/samba server etc...) so
standby'ing the host is not possible.

My present board uses 24W (CPU+board), but with all the disks/ram/DVB
cards this rises to 60W idle, 64W busy.

Switching to "green" drives would save 10W or so.  But below 50W is unlikely.

With a "normal" processor I would get to 50W+40W  = 90W

This would mean an extra 30W a year, or at least £30/$50/yr on lecy,
or $200 over an expected life of 4 years (assuming flat energy prices
which is not historically the case (energy prices have roughly doubled
here in the last 5 years).

Greg


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