Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

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Lawrence Lee
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Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by Lawrence Lee » Thu Feb 17, 2011 9:44 pm


bozar
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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by bozar » Fri Feb 18, 2011 12:34 am

I hate 40 mm fans so much. They really should be forbidden.

Why not install a slim 80 mm fan instead? Should provide enough airflow and at the same time be quiet enough and won't take up that much space.

evot
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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by evot » Fri Feb 18, 2011 2:11 am

Thanks for review.
We'll provide Mini PCIe Wireless LAN card and Broadcom Crystal HD decoder as option, soon.
And, I think if you disable Compiz effect and use hard drive spin-down option of Ubuntu, you may be able to reduce a little power consumption.

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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by rpsgc » Fri Feb 18, 2011 2:15 am

"Given its name and its compact plain cardboard box with the words "small," "silent" and "green" written on each site, you can guess what type of system it holds: what many people now refer to as a nettop." --> side

"An environmentally friendly PC also needs excellent energy efficiency, particularly if the electricity in the local area is generated by sources emits greenhouses gases or generate other waste." --> sources that emit

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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by evot » Fri Feb 18, 2011 2:17 am

bozar wrote:I hate 40 mm fans so much. They really should be forbidden.

Why not install a slim 80 mm fan instead? Should provide enough airflow and at the same time be quiet enough and won't take up that much space.
Why do you hate 40mm fan so much?
We'll be able to consider your ideas for next products.

moritz
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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by moritz » Fri Feb 18, 2011 4:54 am

"uBuntu ... uBuntu ... uBuntu ..." etc. --> Ubuntu ;)

Looks like a nice device, but really, I wouldn't recommend Atom to anyone, budget permitting. At least not as a primary desktop, maybe as a kitchen or media PC. Potentially a nice router (plus light storage) box, too, though you'd need to add a USB NIC for the WAN port.

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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by MikeC » Fri Feb 18, 2011 8:18 am

bozar wrote:I hate 40 mm fans so much. They really should be forbidden.
Perhaps you did not read the review thoroughly enough. As Larry reported, this 40mm fan is smooth and quiet. In fact -- and I can`t recall whether he mentioned this in the review -- the 2.5`drive in there is much noisier than the fan in normal use. When the drive spins down, leaving only the fan running in idle, the noise drops to something like 12 dBA.

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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by evot » Fri Feb 18, 2011 8:32 pm

There is only one nonessential setting, the minimum fan speed, which can be set to "low" or "off." The setting is bit of a misnomer — "off" turns the fan off completely; it will not turn on at all no matter how hot things get.
We don't know exactly the environment or place users use the our product.
We always consider worst case and novice user.

Many unskilled/novice user don't know how to set up the BIOS and read the manual.
We knew that some user worry when fan is not working and case is some hot - although they know it is fanless system,
because they has never experienced fanless system. :)

But, expert or skilled user, they can set up the BIOS easily and understand about characteristic of fanless system.
So, we decided default fan setting as 'slow'.
the ECOPC used about 2W more on average. This is likely due to a less efficient power supply. The T1610 shipped with a Seasonic DC brick.
Hmm...
We considered its size, because higher power DC brick is bigger than our one,
but we'll re-test power supply and be looking for more energy efficient power supply, ASAP.
And, if you disconnect the monitor cable, use headless system as home server w/Amahi Fedora12, power consumption is reduced.

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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by HFat » Sat Feb 19, 2011 4:13 am

The D945GSEJT isn't the last word in efficiency, even for an x86. I don't know if mobile Pinetrails consume less power but if nothing else the US15W chipset can do better (it's apparently got software support issues however). And it looks like some ULV parts such as the Penryns used by Apple can do better as well. Maybe it's even possible to bring down the power consumption of a feature-heavy AMD-based system that low (Ontario?).

Morex's D945GSEJT solution is still good for the price. I'm sure your ECOPC has got advantages (in a hot environment I imagine the quiet fan could be very useful) but if you want to charge a higher price I think you should also offer more. Some other companies (I heard about a couple in the UK alone if I recall correctly) have built PCs based on the D945GSEJT. It's a fairly crowded niche market. In the meantime other chipsets and boards have arrived on the market and, so far as I know, no one has built PCs out of some of them. So there may be an opportunity to build and sell a niche product that has no competition.
What would be really interesting and innovative in my opinion would be a silent ARM PC or server. So far as I now, you can only find ARM-based routers, NAS and mobile devices right now. And they tend to use the underpowered CPUs and configurations if they're silent. It's possible to do better.

For those wanting an expensive energy-efficient x86 router, the fit-PC2i has two gigE ports.

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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by MikeC » Sat Feb 19, 2011 7:21 am

evot wrote:
the ECOPC used about 2W more on average. This is likely due to a less efficient power supply. The T1610 shipped with a Seasonic DC brick.
Hmm...
We considered its size, because higher power DC brick is bigger than our one,
but we'll re-test power supply and be looking for more energy efficient power supply, ASAP.
And, if you disconnect the monitor cable, use headless system as home server w/Amahi Fedora12, power consumption is reduced.
I meant to modify that, because we can't really know that, as we did not measure the efficiency of the other PSU or yours. Given that, this edited statement is mored balanced & fair:
This could be due to a less efficient power supply... [Editor's Note: Or it could just be a sample variance issue. The board, CPU, chipset and PSU are all subject to some variance in power consumption.]

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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by evot » Sat Feb 19, 2011 10:40 am

Some other companies (I heard about a couple in the UK alone if I recall correctly) have built PCs based on the D945GSEJT
.

I think UK companies you mentioned are Aleutia (http://www.aleutia.com) and LinITX(http://linitx.com).
For those wanting an expensive energy-efficient x86 router, the fit-PC2i has two gigE ports.
Intel Atom Z-series are very energy efficient, but it has some limitation.
We also have a plan for dual Gb LAN ECOPC :)

HFat
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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by HFat » Sat Feb 19, 2011 11:23 am

Actually I was thinking about Aleutia and Tranquil. So there may be at least 3 UK companies offering a D945GSEJT build.

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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by frenchie » Sun Feb 20, 2011 7:54 am

Thanks for the review. An ssd version would have been nice for your review :)
Idling at one meter's distance, the machine measured just 17 dBA. Turning the fan completely off resulted in just a 1 dB increase, with the hard drive being the only noise producer.
If you turn the fan off, the noise goes up... ? that's strange...

evot
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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by evot » Sun Feb 20, 2011 9:54 pm

frenchie wrote:Thanks for the review. An ssd version would have been nice for your review :)
Idling at one meter's distance, the machine measured just 17 dBA. Turning the fan completely off resulted in just a 1 dB increase, with the hard drive being the only noise producer.
If you turn the fan off, the noise goes up... ? that's strange...
I think that's strange...hmm

evot
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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by evot » Tue Feb 22, 2011 9:05 pm

MikeC wrote:
evot wrote:
the ECOPC used about 2W more on average. This is likely due to a less efficient power supply. The T1610 shipped with a Seasonic DC brick.
Hmm...
We considered its size, because higher power DC brick is bigger than our one,
but we'll re-test power supply and be looking for more energy efficient power supply, ASAP.
And, if you disconnect the monitor cable, use headless system as home server w/Amahi Fedora12, power consumption is reduced.
I meant to modify that, because we can't really know that, as we did not measure the efficiency of the other PSU or yours. Given that, this edited statement is mored balanced & fair:
This could be due to a less efficient power supply... [Editor's Note: Or it could just be a sample variance issue. The board, CPU, chipset and PSU are all subject to some variance in power consumption.]
Anyway, we've been changed the power supply from 12V 2A to 12V 3.33A DC brick that is more energy-efficient.
But, that's a little bigger than previous one.

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Re: Evo ECOPC: A Silent Nettop

Post by comomolo » Thu Mar 03, 2011 5:57 am

What's with the "uBuntu" funny spelling? It's Ubuntu.

Too much iStuff? ;)

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