[mythtv-users] Requesting some sample kill a watt meter numbers

Joe Hickey jfwd at phlobus.net
Mon Jan 17 17:29:36 UTC 2011


Hi all!

So lately I've noticed my power bill has been high.... or at least
higher than I think it should be based on the amount of stuff in our
small apartment.  So I finally broke out the kill a watt meter and
started measuring my various equipment.

Turns out my combined be/fe is burning 85 watts at idle.... not good!
 I'd like to address that, but I'm hoping first to get some real-world
usage samples to gauge what I could actually save.  I was thinking
about a mini-ITX motherboard, paired with the most efficient PSU I can
find.  The best choice for CPU is still pretty vague to me right now.

Has anyone built a similar backend lately (who also owns a kill a
watt) and would you be willing to share your power usage?

What I'm particularly interested in is the real-world power usage
difference between a very low power cpu, such as via C7/nano, to the
atom-based boards, to a system based on a real processor with enough
power to do commflagging jobs.  A sheevaplug crossed my mind as well,
but seems like this is so low power that even the scheduler/mysql
tasks can bog it down, and I don't like the idea of having all my
storage go through a USB bottleneck.


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