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Voltage Frugal PCs?

Posted by Cliff on from the computing-on-a-budget dept.

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?"

4 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't the monitor the worst offender? by adamy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I was under the impression that the amount of power to the CPU was nothing compared to the power to the Monitor.

    Your best bet is proabaly a laptop with the AC adapter lugged in to the wall. Those are already designed to be low power usage machines.

    --
    Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
  2. Re:Yes. by nadie · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And to improve on that idea, follow Google's example, and replace the disk drive with a flash disk!

  3. Re:Maybe by silicon_synapse · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If the laptop has a healthy ammount of RAM, it shouldn't hit the HDD that often for a firewall should it? Get a decent laptop, pull out the hard drive, beef up the RAM, and boot from a CD-RW or something. Run the OS from a RAMdisk. I wouldn't think a laptop would have any trouble running 24/7 in such a situation.

  4. Re:Maybe: 24x7:Yes by nadie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yes, I run laptops 24x7.

    Yes, I use a laptop as a Nat box/firewall/wireless router, goes without saying, really that it never been turned off for the past 4 months. Is that unusual? I don't think it is.

    Yes, my daily machine is a laptop that never gets turned off. When I close the lid it goes to sleep, screen off, hd spun-down, etc. I would be suprised if this was actually unusual, laptops are made to run all the time, going into sleep mode rather then being turned off. That is part of the feature set, IMHO.