Voltage Frugal PCs?

Red Rocket asks: "There's no shortage of information on building special-purpose PCs. Water-cooled PCs, refrigerated PCs, overclocked monsters, quiet PCs, tiny PCs... it's all there. But there seems to be little info about building a PC that sips the minimum juice from the power grid. So I'd like to throw it out to the Slashdot throng to see what you've done." It would seem like a PC with a low power consumption would be an interesting selling point, especially for those people who are more concerned with something other than high clock speeds. Is there someone marketing a low-powered PC solution (CPU and monitor), if not how difficult and at what expense would it cost to build one?

"I'm going to leave this thing on 24x7 using electricity that I'm paying for so power consumption becomes a real issue. Which CPUs, chipsets, memory technology, and hard drives provide the thinnest power profile for an always-on machine? I'll be running NetWare because it provides the stability of Linux/BSD, exceeds the configuration ease of Windows, and provides the security and worm/virus immunity of...well, NetWare. That'll let me set up that yummy iFolder [novell.com] and have constant access to my data from anywhere on the Net. It also means I'll probably need to stick to an AMD or Intel CPU since AFAIK the Transmeta and Cyrix/VIA chips, like most IS managers, don't really get NetWare. CPU speed isn't much of an issue. 633 MHz should be plenty. Am I the only miser setting up a server?"

Comments

Power consumption

[Lord Sauron]

Theres no answer to your question. Everything depends on the way you use your machine. A processors power consumption depends, among others, on the processing load. In most modern OSs (I dont know if it applies to Netware, but am sure that it applies to 2000/XP and Linux), when the kernel notices theres nothing to process, it issues a HLT instruction, replacing idle cycles with a suspend mode. Then not only the processor takes less energy, but it also cools down.

For older Windows versions, there are some programs that cool down the processor, thus lowering power consumption.

So the power consumption depends on you OS, how you use your machine, etc, etc. But lets face it. Nobody really cares to [desktop] computer consumption, because it usally takes more money to build a low power PC than the savings itd result in a lifetime.

For instance, the cost difference between a $159 17" CRT and a 15" LCD, wich takes less power, simply would be enough to pay you computer power bill for years, IMO. And also, do you really think server monitors should be turned on 24x7 ? The server probably will be locked in a room. Get a cheap CRT and simply turn it off when not using. Its much cheaper.

Speed.

[saintlupus]

CPU speed isn't much of an issue. 633 MHz should be plenty.

Holy crap, I just _upgraded_ my main server to a PPro 200. What are you people doing on these machines?

(It's replacing a 486/66, and the only reason I got rid of that was to get a second IDE channel and some PCI slots instead of ISA. Otherwise, the 486 would have been fine.)

--saint