Hi MtnHermit welcome to SPCR.
The best computational power vs power consumption (for the CPU) is at about 1.8Ghz but 2Ghz is much better number
The problem is not the CPU it only uses less than 4W at idle the problem is the motherboard and chipsets. The chipsets are always two or more generation behind the CPU they use old manufacturing technology for the chipset.
The most energy efficient CPUs if I exclude the manufacturing process is the one with the higher number of cores without HT. Hyper Threading is not efficient.
I'm also interested in low power topics. I will probably soon move offgrid and is easier to reduce the power consumption than to produce. Now I'm working on an electric mini tractor with front end loader and a wind turbine.

Thanks.

Certainly true with Atom, the chipset consumes more than Atom. That's about to change with Clarkdale, only one generation behind. Early number are very encouraging. You mention MB power, have you measured and/or seen test. MB power tends to be lumped into some big power envelope and not broken out. How does one know which MB to select for lowest power?

Unless you have other test results, the HT on Atom has no power impact, see here. Perhaps you're referring to HT as it once was on the P4? BTW, you can get HT or not on various versions of Clarkdale.

Interesting observation and the foundation of practical off the grid living. One poster on another forum remarked that since CFL's now had dimmers, they were much more practical. I use mostly incandescents and find that CFL's and incandescents use the same power when they're both turned off.

@ MtnHermit: would you be willing to post any information about you off grid setup?

thanks mark.

What do you want to know?

Pretty standard setup, solar panels, big lead acid batteries, 4KW Trace inverter, 6KW generator that has 192 hours in 11-years, everything downstream of the inverter runs 120VAC.

I wanted to know general setup costs, and how much you are able to run of off it. in real world rather then Kwh

thanks for the reply.

do you have your pc running from 12v dc or is that also powered by the inverter?

i would love to go off the grid

Not sure I understand, but . . .
Roughly $20K installed, verses $135K for a wire, I'm roughly 4-miles from the nearest utility wires @ $35K/mi. The solar > battery > inverter system runs everything in my house: well, furnace, refrigerator, microwave, TV, DVR, this PC, wireless internet, furnace, washer, dryer, dishwasher, lights . . . everything, but limited to 3KWH/day assuming it's sunny.

EVERYTHING is 120V/60C AC, no DC. If I need DC I'll use a AC/DC converter such as a battery charger for a car. DC is only available at the battery box whereas AC outlets are everywhere, to code.

In 11+ years I've had one failure, last year, 2 of my 12 - 6V batteries died. I shuffled them around such that I'm now running only 8 batteries. They're very heavy ~150# and very expensive ~$300 each and you can't replace two, I'd have to replace all twelve.

wow, that really cool, cant believe how much it is to get the power company to run a cable 4 miles!

i would love the idea of living of the grid, i havnt seen/read about any people in the uk doing it

it must be a good feeling having the your power free after the setup costs

i dont have a clue how much power we use in this house a day as i dont pay the bills, do you find the 3kwh daily limit restricts your appliance usage?

Not really true Clarkdale is integrates the GPU and memory controller on the same chip but there will still be more power used at idle from Memory controller and GPU than CPU for example I have a Q8400s undervolt at 0.925V and the idle power is 4W for the CPU and about 8W for the Northbridge G31 (memory controller and GPU) other 2W+ for the south bridge and the rest up to about 30W idle for my system is Network chip probably 1W+ audio memory another 4W the SSD is only less than 0.48W and a lot of loss on the DC-DC converters for CPU ,RAM and Northbridge.


You can not relay disable HT even if not used it still take power my argument is that a Qxxxx is more efficient than a core i7 core i5 for the same amount of work.


I will use LED and they also use the same power when turned off.
I have some land in the end probably 10 acres (4 hectares) and I will use mainly wind and self made savonius wind turbines for a total of 400kwh/month there will be some solar but wind is still cheaper. I will need a lot of electricity since all will be electric including heating and is Canada right now is -32C. In summer I will use the excess power for an electric tractor and irrigation. I have may plans I do not know when I will be able to finalize everything.

I dunno if you solved this, but i AM running my system completely fanless now. The undervolted nexus is gone
The gigabyte GA-EG45M-UD2H m-atx board is what i'm using. Please note that I'm not usually going with high cpu usage as i only play music, with some filtering and equalization. CPU is around 30-40% max and temps are in the low 50s(°C)

Unfortunately I was not able to remove the Fan the Northbridge G31 in my case is to hoot for my liking.
Interesting that it works for you with G45 that is 24W TDP and it will not work for me on G31 with 15.5W TDP.
Can you put your hand on the Northbridge heatsink after one hour or more in use?.

I dont know but the system sensor says usually 45°, while the cpu averages 51°C with light usage (Music playback only -with equalization)

If this is the case then is relay great 45°C is excellent but maybe the temperature sensor is faulty. If you have access to heatsink ca you measure with the finger usually if is under 60C it will be tolerable.
I may buy the same board or similar if this is the case I will love to get rid of the fan.

Zalman page

"Heat Transfer via Rear-mount Thermal Blocks
When the Rear-mount Thermal Blocks are installed on the back-side of the motherboard in line with the position of the FETs (Field Effect Transistor) and the Northbridge chipset, each can lower the FET temperature by 10 to 30°C and the Northbridge chipset by 5 to 10°C."

These thermal blocks are designed to be used with Zalman TNN cases. I haven't tried them in a regular case, but I thought I'd mention it here in case anyone's interested in experimenting.

Sold as a pack of 8 blocks I think, don't know if they're still available. I suspect they work best with an aluminium uni-body frame type case.

You mean those little blue tubes? Are the white ends made of something that will not short the board?

What are they made of? Where can you buy them?

You mean those little blue tubes? Yes

Are the white ends made of something that will not short the board? sticky thermal tape/pad I think

What are they made of? Aluminium

Where can you buy them? google: Zalman ZM-RTB1

I heard installation can be tricky because the ends aren't sticky enough.

Why pay to Zalman for such low quantities of goods



Official.
At Amazon.

Surely you jest

Are the ends electrically insulated?

I don't have any reason to suspect they're not insulated.

Note - they may not fit under your north bridge if it has a backplate.

I'm not



http://photofile.ru/users/sonic-chainik ... /84991738/

What exactly is under the hot-cold pack?

What is the impact of using the hot-cold pack: on temps and on sound?

The gel inside the pack absorbs vibrations, thus doesn't allow moving parts to generate noise. It also has low temperature resistance coefficient, so the heat is transmitted to massive surface outside very quick and fully. Just as thermal grease does.

There is a HDD under the gel pack, if you go through link to other pictures.

NEW You can see photos with the 260W PSU and 220W brick LINK

[quote="electrodacus"]NEW You can see photos with the 260W PSU and 220W brick LINK[/quote

It would help me, and others, to better understand how this works if you could add a few close up shots showing the wiring and what is connected to what.

Would you please do that?

Yes I will do that no problem. I will add all the info to that Link.
At this time I do some tests and is not working perfect there is a chance that it will not start after a power down if I try to restart from 10 to 25 seconds after the power down if sooner or later then it will 95% of the time work if is in the 10 to 25 sec interval is a chance of 50% that it will not start when I push the power ON button.
The connexion are simple now I use a Y ATX cable to connect the PSU in parallel and a Y4 cable to connect the input 20V together this is all.
But in the end if I do not find a better solution I will conect to the second PSU only the GND and PowerON pin on the ATX cable an 20V input together then use the first PSU to supply the motherboard and videocard and second PSU to supply the CPU and HDD . I already test this and is working perfectly.

I am not certain I understand. When you do the pictures. Can you show it the current way and also this second way, even if the first way doesn't end up working?

Just go to the same LINK and you see that I added another photo that shows how everything is connected there is also an explanation read PPPS Now everything works just fine.

It's making a little more sense. But some more close ups at different angles would help.

One thing that clearly didn't make sense is the 24 wire y-splitter. It looks like one of the plugs has a number of wires pulled out of it. Why did you do that? Why would that help anything? It seems counter-intuitive to me.

Is a 20 wire Y splitter and the only wires that are in the second PSU are GND wires and Power ON the green wire the rest are removed so that the PSU will start and stop at the same time but the different voltage as 12V,5V,3.3V are not connected together. I explained also that the PSUs are starting not exactly at the same time even if they use the same wire for power on the delay is not big 10 to 20ms but this is enough to have one of the PSU that starts first to be unable to provide enough inrush current without triggering overcurrent protection. So the solution is to use one PSU for CPU and HDD and the other one for MB and video card in this way is working great.

Oh that makes sense.

If that is so, then could you get by with just connecting the two boards through that 4 wire plug? The extra connections on the 20 wire must add something, or you wouldn't be doing it. What do they add?

I didn't know that winmate only has a 20 connector ATX plug. What do you do if you have a 24 connector motherboard?