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AMD's Turion 64 on the Desktop

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the building-it-out dept.

Toasty16 writes "SPCR has an overview of using an AMD Turion 64 mobile processor in a desktop system. There's a good bit of info about motherboard compatibility and power consumption as compared to a Pentium M processor. There's also links to articles from the Techreport and LaptopLogic on the same topic. If you've been thinking about building a low power HTPC or file server, mobile processor on desktop is an interesting option."

2 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Replaced my servers for this reason.. by xtal · · Score: 5, Informative

    I was running two very old machines for fileservering and routing/firewall duties. My estimate put these machines at about ~$30-40/mo to run depending on what I was doing. I was able to drop this down by about half moving to a mini ITX board with the via C3 processor, and it only cost about $150. I could have spent less, but I upgraded the power supplies as well.

    You can easily measure how much power your computer draws with a multimeter from the hardware store - last time I was there I saw them for about $10. Put the meter on the AC amps scale, make sure the wires are plugged into the amp reading ports, and then wire it in series with your computer.

    I guarantee you'll be suprised. I was.

    --
    ..don't panic
    1. Re:Replaced my servers for this reason.. by drgould · · Score: 5, Informative

      You can easily measure how much power your computer draws with a multimeter from the hardware store - last time I was there I saw them for about $10. Put the meter on the AC amps scale, make sure the wires are plugged into the amp reading ports, and then wire it in series with your computer.

      Don't forget, what you're measuring is apparent power, which is really volt-amps. Computer power supplies have a significant power factor, so what you really want to do is measure the corrected real power which is in watts.

      Go to ThinkGeek and pick up a Kill-A-Watt, which will not only tell you how many watts your computer actually consumes, but also things like power-factor and kilowatt-hours, which is a much more accurate measure of power consumption.