economical pc
 

I recently burned yet another voltage regulator module on an expensive board...and no fixing it. I took extra care for the case, the cooling down to 3 fans, it looked like the day I installed it 3.7 years ago. It is the longest i have ever run a pc, 23900 hours runtime.I can't stand the pile I created the past ten years...
My brother had some old pcs, I went for a 290 mile round trip to get them. One was a 633 celeron that never ran properly, some real smart guy at hewlett packard though it could run on 100w. Brilliant ....
I remembered back a few years, flying around in linux with a pentium 2. the big net crash happened while I owned it. I made a vow...
everything post socket 370 can do some work safely. I am here in a year 2000 pc, ubuntu os, all for free. Save the old pc...from creating an even bigger useless pile of overthunk greed for need.
I can't vid edit, or even watch a video..the highlight for the p3 generation was encryption to 128 bit mandatory for all secure transactions. Still useful. I keep it as a backup. I needed this reminder, coming down from 3400mhz and a 725mhz vid card.....:rolleyes:

My problem has always been hard drives. For me it usually follows a cycle.

- Running out of space, add second HD
- First starts clicking and acting slow
- I consider reinstalling OS on the second, and slaving the first.
- Don't want to do all that work again for the same machine, buy a new HD, that easily can hold both disks and more, and install in a new machine. Save that same CD burner from 1999 that I only seem to use to install the OS.
-Repeat

I should own stock in WD or Seagate.

I haven't really played to much with changing the voltage on a mother board. (Over or under clocking)

Y'all should get SSDs. They're so snappy and responsive, and very easy to live with with no moving parts and low power consumption. They're supposed to last for decades.

Downsides: they're expensive and small. Totally worth it for me.

@bgd: I choose components for low noise, heat, and power consumption. I have an 80W PSU in my 2.0GHz Sempron rig. I really can't picture myself needing a PSU bigger than 120W, ever. Yet all the hardware review sites are talking about the next, greatest, 500-1000W PSU that you need if you want to play the latest games. Hogwash. Buy a PicoPSU.

Buy a netbook.

I'm seriously considering SSD. I'm not really a laptop person, so I won't go the netbook route.

http://i38.tinypic.com/rkpnxi.jpg
600MHz TI OMAP CPU. Very efficient and surprisingly fast.

Old monitor + old keyboard + mouse + netbook = new computer

Also, 600mhz is not fast at all.

600MHz is fast if it's ARM-based like the TI OMAP. TI has an ARM-based CPU (DaVinci) that can encode 1080p x264 in real time with just 400MHz.

I'm waiting on some of the newer ARM-based CPUs that go into the GHz.

And note that most desktop applications do not need much CPU at all.

Especially in the winter, when they double as space heaters. Or maybe you could put a flap in the case, so it be used as a toaster oven :-)

I work on an IBM Thinkpad laptop, which (running just the internal display) draws about 17 watts in just-editing-code mode. The larger external display I use probably bumps that up a few watts, but still, even running (seriously compute-intensive) tests just gets me to the 30-40 watt range.

Something somehow appeals to have a really oversized power supply, like putting a 500HP turbocharged diesel engine in a compact. Yet it will not improve performance if it's not needed. And only large servers and workstations will stress a 500w power supply.

I have a 550W Antec Truepower Trio in my older PC, but that is because that's what I had. It actually gets great efficiency since it's 80 Plus.

I have the PC running 24/7 since that's the only one I have with me that is designed for continuous full load operation. I loaded it down more now that the weather is cooling down. It is actually keeping my bedroom nice and warm at night when it drops to as low as 50F outside while only using 60w at low load to 150w at full load. So during the day, I'm using it for its designed purpose and at night, it runs Folding@Home while keeping my bedroom warm enough to comfortably sleep in.

When the weather starts warming back up, I will use a low powered PC instead for most purposes. I have an old Pentium 4 laptop that is half broken (bad fan, cannot find a replacement), which I will fix later. in my situation, I am actually better off running old PCs for heat since they are just as efficient as resistance heaters and do some other useful work at once. (Maybe I should write a simple program to measure the room temperature using a 1-Wire sensor and adjust bulk CPU load to regulate temperature?)

Another trick is to angle the PCs so the fans blow to the side and hang wet laundry on a rack a short distance away. So now it also works as a clothes dryer for the winter.

Almost a year ago I rebuilt my pc. I went from a box that idled at 141W down to one that idled at 58W with MUCH better performance. There were two keys to the build, one was a power efficient CPU, the other was using nVidia's hybrid SLI technology which basically allows me to power down the video card when it is not needed.

I have a thread about it here:
Building an efficient computer - EcoRenovator

Err... Why? Unless you're running some kind of web server at home, why not turn it off when you're not using it?

Fans are probably the biggest reason I went to notebooks, and spend some time optimizing them for low power. Constant noise like that really gets on my nerves. And of course around here I can just hang clothes on the line, since it's rare to get more than two or three wet days in a row.

He is running a "service" of sorts
Folding@home - Main

and heating his bedroom :)

That kind of reverses the logic. Folding @home & similar projects were conceived as a way to get some use out of all the PCs that people leave on. But the question, if a person is at all interested in energy efficiency, is why leave the PC running in the first place?

Well I think using it to heat a bedroom and simultaneously help solve large protein folding problems is a reasonably conscientious usage. If it is actually used for heating then there is little energy to lose. Better than putting it in an air conditioned room.

Technically a heat pump would provide more heat for the same electricity, but I don't think an extra kWh/day is egregious either.

Here are my specs. I tried to go low energy consumption...and mega cheap.

Motherboard:ECS 7050m-m v2.0

CPU:AMD 5050e Brisbane 2.6GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 45W Dual-Core Processor

RAM : MEM 2Gx2|OCZ OCZ2F8004GK R

Video Card: SAPPHIRE 100255HDMI Radeon HD 4670 512MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card, Integrated with native HDMI port

PSU Antec 80plus 430Watts

Monitor (connection used): HDMI

Hard drives: HD 500G|WD SATA2 32M WD5000AADS

Optical Drives: None connected

Additional PCI cards: none

Number of fans present: 1x120mm case / Artic Cool CPU fan

Operating System : Windows Vista 64

Haha, drew1d. Thats almost the exact same specs as my computer, except I used a 9800 GTX+. I was going to go with the Radeon 4670 until I found out about hybrid sli.

You're smarter than me Sir. The 4670 has been giving me problems. How do you like the 9800 GTX+? Would you recommend it?

In general, Nvidia works better than ATI on 64-bit. Both of my 64-bit PCs have Nvidia cards and they work great.

...why not just buy a 128-bit abacas?--no electricity required!

I just bought basically the cheapest 9800 GTX+ I could find at the time. It is made by Galaxy and had a $40 rebate. I really don't use it a ton. The onboard video can handle some 3d stuff surprisingly (example, I was playing the original halflife the other day). On the newer more intense stuff I enable the card and it has worked great.

If your a PC gamer who likes to play the newest games on high specs then power usage is probably not a massive concern, if you don't play games but don't want a laptop interface, buy a laptop (spec doesn't matter much if you don't play games), stick it somewhere around you desk, hook it up to a monitor, keyboard, mouse, speaker system and you have a low power system. I've tested a few laptops with a power meter and never seen them draw more than 50-90w on full load, chuck in another 30-40w for a monitor.

I have a Core 2 Duo e6750 with a 600MHz overclock, a Radeon 4870 and 3 hard drives, and under full load (CPU and GPU) draws around 360w, though it idles most of the time around 170w, 150w if i turn of folding@home. I have a 520w PSU with 80% efficiency rating meaning the actual PSU max is around 410w, so my PSU is the perfect wattage for my system.