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I get my numbers from an actual measurements. Where do you get yours? If you don't have an meter, play with this for a bit.

if your interested in how it works you can read this or a less technical WIKI

Older Processors used lots of power too, and the old power supplies were usually less than 70% efficient

A 25 watt P3 with 3 10 watt (idle) hard drives with no video and a super efficient 10 watt mother and memory and no fans will still use 65 watts, but with the efficiency of 70% that means 85 watts for a best case scenario for an older pc.

Since the pc does little real "work" virtually all of that is expressed as heat in your house. Fine in winter, but in summer that takes another 100 watts to cool that hot air.

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and another from 2004>

But most likely these are going to be machines from the last 2 years that can't play the new games, and will likely use far more power.

For reference, my SLI game setup (AMD64 5600 X2, 2 Raptors, 2 Asus 6600 GTS's) pulls 520 real watts playing half life.

I can only afford to play in winter. :P

A lot of motherboards have a two-pin header where you can attach a thermistor. Here's some how-to on it. Instead of sticking the thermistor to the inside of the PC, run it outside the box. Now you have a PC thermometer. There is plenty of free software like Motherboard Monitor that you can use to grab the temperature from within your own program.

From the picture in the pcworld.com article, it looks like a standard system that has been around for quite a while, a Falcon CR51.

The standard box, which they sell at Fry's, includes a VIA mini-ITX motherboard, with a VIA C3 processor.

It's a decent system, but the fan on the power supply is VERY loud. Hopefully they've addressed that.

I like the concept. A simple file server that I could even stick at my Parent's home to save digital pictures, documents, etc. But, it should be a small/silent device; maybe the form factor of a 5.25" firewire enclosure. Or, make it a bit bigger, and put two drives in a RAID configuration for file server reliability..

OK, I first want to admit that nVidia makes some good graphics chips. Right now there is nothing out there better for gamers (even though I personally don't care about gaming).

My problem with nVidia comes from their arrogance towards my friend, and also me here at the CES. We run a site called Target PC, and we scheduled a meeting with them at the conference. This was my first time meeting them, and my friend's third time. He didn't even want to do, because he knew that he was going to get mad, again. I didn't know what he was talking about, until we got there.

Our site gets several thousand visitors a day, and we both it's beyond reasonable to have nVidia send us reference boards for review like they do for the other major websites like Tom's Hardware and Anandtech. We get to talking to they guy about this, and he turns into a major jerk. He starts making up lame numbers, saying that they can't afford to send these cards to us, bla bla. He basically told us that they don't care about us, or our website.

He might as well told us to "get the fuck out of here, and don't come back". My friend said this is how he got treated before, also.

So anyway, I though you all might want to know how they treat reviewers who's names are not Anand or Tom.

Actually if you read the article they mention a complete all-in-one solution that I am reffering to. I currently have a linksys wireless router.

The article talks about a cable modem/router/wireless access point device coming out in the future.

>>In the second quarter of 2002 they have an
>>interesting all in one solution combining a
>>cable modem and a wireless 802.11a router

Why the hell is everything called a "solution" these days?! A network card isn't a network card, but a "wireless network access solution". Samsung displayed their latest LCD and flat TV solutions! Yamaha had their DVD+RW solution on display as well.

Jesus! Someday soon a mouse won't be a mouse but a "cursor-moving and activation solution". I liked it better when a monitor was a "monitor" and a flat-panel monitor was an "expensive, cool-looking monitor".

Why the hell is everything called a "solution" these days?! A network card isn't a network card, but a "wireless network access solution". Samsung displayed their latest LCD and flat TV solutions! Yamaha had their DVD+RW solution on display as well.

Jesus! Someday soon a mouse won't be a mouse but a "cursor-moving and activation solution". I liked it better when a monitor was a "monitor" and a flat-panel monitor was an "expensive, cool-looking monitor".

I found the following quote pretty amusing:

For optimal performance we did not compress the pictures, loading times might be longer for some and click the picture to enlarge.

Translation: we wanted to tell all our friends we'd been Slashdotted, so we made sure to include an assload of moderate-to-high resolution pics right in the page. We did, however, mess with the aspect ratio of some of the pics to make people think they were looking at super-long TVs displaying female dwarf powerlifters.

First off, I read a good portion of the reviews that I found linked from Blue's News:
Source Magazine
Target PC
Hardware Unlimited
Tech Report
Gamer's Depot

What's the upshot? That even with each processor's "ideal" system (DDR on the Athlon, RAMBUS on the P4)-- well, the P4 kicks ass at Quake 3: Team Arena. I mean, it's really really good at Quake 3. So good, in fact, that-- well, you won't be running anything else, I hope?

Because in almost every other app, the cheaper Athlon 1.2 equals or outperforms the P4. That even includes apps such as POVRay that did some early optimizations for the P4's extended instructions. I recommend reading the Tech Report's overview if you're interested in that; they have more details on exactly which instructions were used, and the current state of Intel's compilers for the chip.

Keep in mind, of course, that the compilers are still a bit beta-ish-- sometimes they actually make the programs run slower. But they never appeared to actually make it faster than an Athlon 1.2.

Debate what you will about future extensibility, and so on-- but unless you're going to be playing a whole lot of Quake, if you're looking for a new system you should grab one of those cheap Athlon CPU/Motherboard combos selling for $300 at Fry's.

Here is an article about a PPC motherboard product called RioRed.

The company is called SiliconFruit, and this board seems like vapor. However, it is still a very interesting read about their ambitions.

Check out this article that I wrote about an ATX PPC board.

EC


"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of

I have written an article that will help you XML-newbies get up to speed on the idea of XML and some of the sub-specs. The Promise of XML.

I believe eventually we are going to get to a point where server-side transcoding will not be necessary. However, this will be several years, and we are going to have to learn how to do all of this efficiently.

I am even developing my own transcoding software process because I belive I have a better method of doing it than what is currently available. If and when I do succeed it will be closed-source because I want to make money off of my product, not just give away all my hard work.

Anyway, the next few years are going to be very interesting.

E

Target PC has an article on a new open PowerPC platform from a company named Silicon Fruit. A motherboard codenamed RioRed is in development and has plenty of high-end features including dual G4s and 64 bit PCI slots. It will ship with Yellow Dog Linux, and they are negotiating to get BeOS ported over. In the middle of next year the company plans to ship a workstation based on this motherboard with some interesting features.

I built the targetpc.com site, and it is about a month old. The site specializes in news and reviews.

The both sites have very similar header and footer designs. I noticed right away.

Do you think they copied off us? Hmmm....

(For those that can't take satire, I am not serious about what I am saying.)

Eric Murphy
eric@targetpc.com