Given how much my Sempron64 pulled down (~140W) and the power required to stream audio via an old PIII (~70W) in the living room I decided to drop some green on a low power mobo/proc with the insurance it would pay itself off before the warranty was up, not that I've ever had a computer die on me unless I killed it. I settled on Via since they seemed to offer the lowest power consumption combos compared to
Intel's offerings, and right before I was gonna pull the trigger on one of the older C3s I noticed the
C7 wasn't too bad at $60 w/ free shipping. Since Vista was a bit of a flop, DDR2 was dirt cheap at half or less what everything else was. $90+ got me the combo with a gig of what's essentially PC3200. I had a PS and HD on hand to use and cobbled together a low power "shelf", but a PS/HD/case/dvdrw should be doable for another $70, leaving the user with a "TC2502 Green gPC" with a gig of ram, twice the disk space, and a dvd burner for ~$40 less.
Power consumption does not disappoint, the entire system and my 19" CRT monitor use (110W) less than the Sempron64 system did at idle with the exact same HD/PS. W/o the monitor it draws 45W at 100% CPU running climateprediction.net, and around 35W at idle. Unfortunately Via's PowerSaver doesn't work for this CPU, but it ain't no big deal since it uses as much as comparable setups use at idle and wasting CPU cycles is a shame when most of the power is going to the mobo. All the hardware drivers seem to work well under linux/GNU and xcompmgr/transset even works with the onboard video!
All in all I wasn't disappointed, since it will allow me to manage the uptime of other systems in the house as well as log wind speed and act as a message relay. Once I get my IR receiver/3.5mm cable for streaming stuff in the living room the system should pay itself off in ~4-6 months. The only downsides IMO are that it only has two PCI slots and no gigabit ethernet, but even then I'm just nitpicking.
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