Saving power by changing computing habits and hardware

[roflwaffle]

The C7 will be about as fast as your PIII give or take. It's slower than my Sempron 3000+@1ghz/.9V in everything except for CPU MD5 (hardinfo benchmark) and uses the same power more or less. I'm betting that w/ a m-atx/onboard video the Sempron 3000+ rig would use the same or less power since it only uses about 10W more than my C7 system, all things being equal. What 1.5ghz C7 are you getting? Also, what kinds of use/users do your rigs see? That's just as important as anything else IMO.

[Coyote X]

My media computer uses an AMD Geode NX1750 cpu that I underclocked one step down from normal speed and it runs fanless now. 1gb of ram, 8gb compact flash card for the hard drive. I am also using a fanless video card. That computer is dead silent since I took the fans out of the 200W power supply that powers it. With no fans in an aluminum case it barely gets warm when using the dvb card to play hdtv feeds. The dvb card actually gets warmer than the rest of the computer combined. The video card is I think directx7 or 8 only. Doing normal stuff has no need for graphic accelerators so don't worry about the video card specs other than power consumption.

So find a good low powered setup and use a compact flash card for the drive, or a 4200rpm laptop drive if you want low power and silent running. If you are using it for browsing and email only configure the browser cache to not write to the drive and use compact flash. It uses a lot less power and is solid state so silent. Keep the flash under half full so wear leveling can keep it lasting a really long time.

[NoCO2]

For the most part, I usually just web-surf, word process, chat and program on my computers. I went through a phase of overclocking which is why I have the Core2...that and for games. But I don't really have time / play games anymore that much so it's more or less just dead weight except for the hard drives.

I basically just want a really really small, really really quiet, really really efficient machine. I don't care so much if it's a C7 or an AMD or Intel, I just don't know if I can make an mATX machine as small as a C7 machine.

Also, I will be running linux on the C7 if I get it so, really, processing power isn't an issue. I have on the P3 that I'm running on currently, installed Ubuntu 7.10 and I did a lot of clean up and hacking away at processes to get it to run on about 60MB of RAM and installs just under 2 GB on the hard drive (not including swap). That's not bad considering it started it's life at a 4GB install and 256MB minimum requirements.

My only complaint is that programs like firefox and movies are very choppy. I think this is mainly CPU related since I see the CPU spike to 100% when opening either firefox or playing a youtube movie...will the C7 be better at these things or will I see similar performance?

[roflwaffle]

I don't know why you couldn't make a matx system small, just get the right sized case or build your own? Someone on the Gentoo forums pointed out that a PCI/AGP video card uses more than onboard, so I tested it and w/o a PCI video card my underclocked/undervolted Sempron rig uses the same as my C7 rig. The C7 handles most videos and firefox pretty well, so maybe the lag of your PIII system is because of the video card/drivers, or because it's using swap...

Your choices really depend on how much you want to/can do, and what you want. The C7 is fine for most in terms of web/mail/video/etc and ya don't need to do anything to see low power consumption figures, but it's not very fast. Other systems of similar pricing can be dropped down to the C7's power consumption figures w/ faster processing power/64 bit capability as well as provide more processing power at the cost of more power on demand if ya don't mind having to configure more stuff. Why not use a killawatt to see what you can do with your Core 2 Duo system via undervolting&underclocking/using onboard video/one hard disk first? You may be able to get it to the point where, with a matx board and passive heat sink, it'll use as much as a C7 system. In terms of networked file sharing why not just use WOL to turn on a machine if you want to access it's data? No use in having three or four hard disks and a whole machine idle when most of the time you won't need access to the data.

[Gone4]

Originally Posted by NoCO2

My only complaint is that programs like firefox and movies are very choppy. I think this is mainly CPU related since I see the CPU spike to 100% when opening either firefox or playing a youtube movie...will the C7 be better at these things or will I see similar performance?

My laptop is a 1.4ghz first generation Centrino. I can set the processor speed as low as 600 MHz to save battery life, and a few settings in between as well as automatically adjusting it for me. Anyways, when I force it to operate at a constant 600 MHz, flash videos can be choppy during playback, but at 1.4 GHz they are fine. Since RAM, programs, et. al. do not change, this definitely means 600 MHz is the limiting factor. I'm going to go out on a limb and say your Via C7 shouldn't experience any problems playing flash videos, but as we all know, there is no substitute for testing

[NoCO2]

yea, well, like I said, I'm going to get it regardless because I just think they are so neat with their size and all. If I find it does what I need it to well enough, then I'll probably end up either selling the Core 2 or at least moving the case somewhere out of the way and only turn it on when I need it and live mostly off the VIA system. I have a feeling it will work just fine. I have been working on this P3 now for almost a week and my only complaint is the load time for firefox and that flash videos are lagging a bit. But I have been monitoring my system usage the whole time and RAM usage has never spiked above 150MB out of the 256MB installed so that's not the limit. The graphics card is only an 8MB GeForce card from forever ago so that might be it. I have a newer card I can swap into it to see. Otherwise it's probably the processor. The C7 is somewhere between 1.0 and 1.5Ghz (can't really find any specs for exactly what) but it has a FSB speed of 800mhz so it's at least that fast, probably faster though which should be more then enough for basic usage. I also think the idea of a completely silent, fanless computer is neat, I've always wanted one of those .

[zjrog]

I've got 2 PCs on most of the time. One dedicated Linux box, an older P3 700MHz business machine. It does go into hibernate and the monitor shuts down. The other is used by everyone in the house, and is a dual boot machine. It is also a gaming machine with dual vidcards... I use a fan controller to run the fans faster when gaming, and all but off when idle or in hibernate.

I'm considering one of the new Ultra Mobile PCs whcih are just small laptops. I would love to carry one for GPS and music and photo storage in the Jeep and while camping, batter charging would be with solar panel...

[no_roads]

Well a little dramatic. I have 4 laptops 2 tablets and 4 tower PC's. I'm an IT and I work with computers all the time what I've found that helps with saving on the elctric bill is that instead of turning your laptops or portable computers off put them in standby if you plan on using them again within say about 2 weeks because it takes a toll on your computer as well as your electric bill if you repeatedly turn them back on. I have my laptops each setup for whatever task I think best suits each one. Like for instance I have one that is completely dedicated to iTunes and loading my iPod because everyone who has one and pretty much everyone does know that unless you have a boat load of money just lying around to build a really awesome PC then when you are going through music and loading songs the PC really can't do mush else like if you want to surf the net or play games watch movies, etc.. I don't load it down with anything but the basics and I put almost everything on my external hard drives( you can get terabit hard drives really cheap nowadays) that keeps your computer from ahving to work so hard and if your computer crashes then you don't have to worry so much about losing all that data. Also your computer doesn't have to search through all that extra stuff to get to what you are looking for which will also save time and energy(yours and your computers).

[bennelson]

I have a 17" MacBook Pro laptop. The screen is beautiful and the sleep mode is fantastic.

It really was an expensive computer, but I was looking for something pretty high end for graphics design and video editing.

I was pleasanly suprised by the power-saving features of the computer. The OS is pretty smart about dimming the monitor, sleeping the hard disc, etc.


All that talk about small, powerfriendly computers is interesting. The electric motor controller in my motorcycle is an Alltrax AXE. It has a 9-pin COM port for communicating to a computer.

If I had an energy efficient computer built into my not-yet-created electric car, I could use the computer to monitor amps, volts, etc of the motor.
The software has super-simple minimum requirements other than it must run Windows and have a COM port.

[Gone4]

Originally Posted by bennelson

The software has super-simple minimum requirements other than it must run Windows and have a COM port.

Is there anyway you can get software that runs on Linux or, even better, BSD? You can run them, especially BSD, on machines so crappy that a windows GUI has never booted on. As the jokes go, NetBSD runs on everything including your toaster (it has run on toasters).