johnnynyquist wrote:
HFat wrote:
Unless your brick is unusually inefficient, there must be something (voltage regulation? I/O controllers outside the NM10?) burning power like a desktop on that board because Pineview latops reportedly use a lot less power. It would be interesting if you could post power consumption at idle and at load in an OS (try to stress the GPU too).
After continued observation, I have not seen the power consumption drop below a floor of about 15.3 W, even with aggressive CPU scaling. I think it must be the MoBo design, though there's not much there. Of course, that ultra-bright power button LED could be dropping at least a watt

I have not had (and don't foresee having) an opportunity to push on the GPU, sorry.
It's worth pointing out that AC bricks are not going to be better than 90% efficient and may be closer to 80%. (review
here!) Plus, the efficiency seems to go down at lower demand. Finally the PicoPSU is rated between 85-94% efficient depending on the voltage and load level (
datasheet). So 15.3-17.8 W at the wall * 0.85 (brick) * 0.9 (PicoPSU) means 11.7-13.6 W used by the system, maybe even less.
The processor at its rated TDP (8.5W), plus the southbridge at ITS rated TDP (2.1W) = 10.6W.
If we assume the MB uses a constant amount of power and that the full range of variation is due to the CPU itself: the high end of that (13.6 W) minus the power dissipation of the core (10.6 W) leaves 3 W burned by the motherboard, RAM, and HDD. There's not a whole lot of room to bring that down, though certainly in a laptop motherboard I would expect better.
Of course, the efficiency of the PSU varies with load, complicating the measurement process. Maybe it's time for SPCR to revisit its
PSU analysis for AC adapters..
