* 3.5 Embedded Controller with Socket P for Intel Core 2 Duo / Core Duo Processor, FSB 800 MHz
* SO-DIMM Socket for up to 2.0 GB of DDR2 SDRAM
* Intel 965GME and ICH8M Chipsets
* Mini-PCI Socket for Expansion
* EIDE and two SATA controllers
* DUAL Intel 82573l 10/100/1000 LAN
* Two High Speed Serial Ports, Six USB 2.0, IrDA
* Compact Flash Type II Socket for up to 8 GB
* 7.1 channel Realtek ALC888 HD Audio Codec
* 40.77 Watts is the typical power consumption, Idle: 21.07 Watts
* W: 5.75 x D: 4.0 x H: 0.72 (W: 146 mm x D: 102 mm x H: 18.2 mm)
* Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
It idles at 35W, and it’s been patiently running in my closet for the last six months (I actually put a quieter Noctua 120mm fan in the lid). Other than rebooting for the occasional Xubuntu upgrade, it happily chugs along, downloading torrents, acting as a Tor relay node, and running SETI@home. I’ve been meaning to use MisterHouse on it to do some home automation (nice that it has usb and serial both). There’s now an Atom-based version of the mobo, which is quite tempting, I have to say (I’d love to get under 10W total, and most of that would be the SATA HD).
None of these boards is as good as recycling an old laptop for most projects.
Cheap/free, small form factor, built in keyboard/mouse/screen and of course very low power. Environmentally it’s better to recycle than make something new too.
The cost of these low power boards alone, especially if you want a special low power PSU and small case is ridiculous. The extra initial outlay more than outweighs the extra electricity used by an underclocked Sempron system, and environmentally the recycled laptop wins, especially if it would otherwise be scrapped (broken screen etc).
Hm, m0n0wall/smoothwall/pfSense/etc?
Peoples complaint with such systems always seems to be that it’s a waste of power to run a full machine to do (almost) the same as a silent, low power consumer router.
I’ve no idea how much power an average router uses, but I imagine it’s not far of what the *-ITX boards draw, and they are more than fast enough to run any of those router-OS’s…
Jason Richardson/If a CF card has wear protection is it suitable as a boot device?
Yes. While CF cards will probably not last as long as a decent, regular hard-drive, the limited number of read/writes will probably never be an issue.
The cards will have improved since that (largely speculative) complaint first came up. For example, my camera uses CF cards, I have about 2 I use, and have taken around over 15,000 photos with them (and transfered them to a computer - sometimes several times), and both are still working perfectly.
Add to that the fact they cost like 10 now, and it would be incredibly trivial to clone the CF card every few months as a backup, and equally easy to replace it… Plus the router OS’s I mentioned above are designed to be run of CF cards, so only really read/write when necessary (booting, saving settings, storing logs)
I’m just being a pedantic asshole, but the concept of ten times less is a bit confusing to me. I’m guessing in this case it’s 1/10th.
When somebody says Foo has 10 times more X than Bar I think that Foo has 10 (or 11, depending on who I’m talking to) Bars worth of X. So when I see ten times less I’m inclined to think of negative 10 (or negative 9), which would be truly astonishing power consumption.
Whether it’s 11/9 or 10/10 is about the same as the difference between people who indicate you have something on your face to wipe off via mirror-image vs. by rubbing their right to correspond to Messy-Face’s right.
network booting thin client perhaps, for use with LinuxMCE? don’t know if it has the stones to render the video, but if so, could be pretty sweet to duck-tape to the back of a display…
I’m thinking of gutting a ps-one case and building myself a PC into it. I’ll use the PS ONE as a firewall. I’ll run my internet connection through my playstation console.
Naturally, you won’t get barn-burning performance, but if you remember the Pentium II 300 Mhz systems of yesteryear, you’ll know what to expect. You may recall those now-ancient boxes were still able to do some pretty amazing things in their day. I would not build an ultra-lower power PC assuming it will be tolerable for day-to-day web browsing and email reading, unless you’re comfortable using text mode or command-line interfaces exclusively.
My first HTPC was a PII-300 with 128mb of ram and a 40gb drive. Ran DivX fine. Now of course I have an ancient AMD TBird 1600+ with a gig of ram and tb of hdd.
surely if your wanting it as a media center type box you need to wait a couple of years so these size machines will support 1080p through hdmi or something similar.
Hehe, those cuties eat around 5 watts? Let’s assume, a regular desktop uses 150 watts, that way, we can have around 20 of those cuties + some switch in order to connect those cuties into a big distributed system.
And now, we can start thinking: Can this distributed system of like 20 tiny computers get faster than the desktop that uses 150 Watts?
And getting even more into the geek-domain, think about extending this into some sort of hive-system, with jobs being assigned around, small cuties going to powerless sleep, being woken up again and such. Mm, I want that.
By all reports, the EPIA processors are a tad too underpowered to play full HD content despite the purported GPU support. The CPU can only handle about 720p IIRC at 100% load. The Nano should be able to handle 1280p handily.
It’s a mini-itx form factor and comes with a decent looking case for around $200
I can’t find power consumption details, but I imagine it won’t be ultra low since it has a hard drive and optical disk, but you could probably modify those.
I too would like to see the nano. I have an VIA ME6000 passive mini ITX box at the moment. It sits beneath the TV in a Silverstone LC09 box (high WAF factor) turned off most of the time. When it’s time to record a show it turns on automatically (via BIOS timing function), boots over the net from a NSLU2, records the show using a Hauppauge PVR 250 back to the root NFS mounted NSLU2 and switches off again. Can’t get much lower power than that.
For playback I used to use the ME6000 output to the TV but playback performance has got a bit choppy recently (Mythtv under debian testing; I’ve probably installed too much extra stuff on it). So I use my PC with a windows client I found somewhere.
To be honest, even if this low-power system is cool, I don’t see any real usage for it. It can’t be used as a multimedia center since it’s too slow to play HD and it doesn’t have a DVI/HDMI port. Nor it can’t be used as a NAS (Network Attached Storage) server since it doesn’t have SATA ports (all new big hard-disks are on SATA).
How much longer before someone fabs the entire computer – CPU, memory controller, graphics core, south-bridge (and all connectivity features), etc – onto a single integrated circuit? You could probably get the whole thing so small that the limiting factor would be connector ports for power, USB, audio, etc.
Wow. Almost as low power as my good old LinkSys NSLU2 media server which is 3 Watts. These have been about for years and are very cheap and with a hacked (Unslung) BIOS will run loads of Linux programs.
Wow, people have mentioned hackintoshes, iPhones, the rumored new small Apple device, but no love for the a href=http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.htmlMac Mini/a? 6.5 square, 20-30 watts power use (idle/load), a significantly better CPU? Anyone?
