Search found 157 matches

by drees
Tue Nov 13, 2012 7:49 pm
Forum: Green Computing
Topic: My house idles at 75W
Replies: 29
Views: 50354

Re: My house idles at 75W

plus PGE can pay you nothing for the extra juice and then rake it in hand over fist by greedily selling it to your neighbors at full market value. screw the grid, cut the cord! (until power monopolies have to pay a fair rate for the power you are giving them.) The only time you get screwed is if yo...
by drees
Tue Nov 13, 2012 10:56 am
Forum: Power Supplies
Topic: Efficiency vs load analyzed for 20 PSUs
Replies: 9
Views: 12873

Re: Efficiency vs load analyzed for 20 PSUs

Wow, these charts are awesome and really help visualize the difference in efficiency between PSUs - in particular the low-power portion which is of particular interest to me. Nicely done!

The SS-350TGM really stands out in comparison to the rest at low power thanks to these charts.
by drees
Tue Nov 13, 2012 10:45 am
Forum: Green Computing
Topic: My house idles at 75W
Replies: 29
Views: 50354

Re: My house idles at 75W

Eventually, we'll be building a new Off Grid home and we're working to get our total demand down so a 1Kw PV array is large enough. Our current demand is over 44Kw per day according to our electric bill. That's what we really need to drop and I'm hoping to get down to below 5Kw per day. Not sure wh...
by drees
Tue Sep 18, 2012 11:52 am
Forum: Power Supplies
Topic: Seasonic G360W gold for $60 - Review & Giveaway!
Replies: 169
Views: 246944

Re: Seasonic G360W gold for $60 - Review & Giveaway!

Plus, efficiency is just one parameter of many... including convenience, noise, compatibility, price, versatility, other electrical performance factors. For a mini PC, yes, the picoPSU+brick is great. But for mATX or small ATX case, I'd take the G360 hands down. What you get for the price is unmatc...
by drees
Mon Sep 17, 2012 4:54 pm
Forum: Power Supplies
Topic: Seasonic G360W gold for $60 - Review & Giveaway!
Replies: 169
Views: 246944

Re: Seasonic G360W gold for $60 - Review & Giveaway!

Nice looking PSU - 360W is still overkill for my PCs. I'd love to see a 200W PSU with efficiency numbers pushed up to 90% at lower power outputs, especially in the 30-50W range where most PCs spend their time idling these days.
by drees
Fri Jun 17, 2011 11:30 pm
Forum: SPCR Announcements
Topic: Re: Mike's final sign-off - POSTPONED
Replies: 70
Views: 139819

Re: Mike's final sign-off

Sorry to hear that you'll be signing off, Mike, but am hopeful SPCR lives on.

By far, your in depth reviews with a focus on noise and energy consumption has been one the most useful tech sites I visit on a daily basis.

The forums here are also top-notch!
by drees
Wed Jul 14, 2010 3:47 pm
Forum: Power Supplies
Topic: Dell RM112 235W 80+ Gold PSU
Replies: 43
Views: 50646

Nice mod - looks tempting to replace my Pico PSU with - the brick mine came with makes a horrible noise when the fan spins up which happens whenever the CPU gets to full load...

Looks like you can find them for $34/shipped on eBay - pretty inexpensive, too!
by drees
Mon Jul 20, 2009 11:12 am
Forum: Silent Storage
Topic: Transform 'Cuda 7200.11 1.5tb into Velociraptor Killer
Replies: 78
Views: 82811

So shortstroking, combined with Raid 0, should help scratch disk throughput in applications like video editing? Yes - if your application is limited by disk throughput and you don't need all the disk space provided by your disks, you can ensure that streaming throughput is always maximized by short...
by drees
Sat Jul 18, 2009 11:27 am
Forum: Silent Storage
Topic: Transform 'Cuda 7200.11 1.5tb into Velociraptor Killer
Replies: 78
Views: 82811

It needs to be a single partition, i.e. you do not place any other partitions on it, which you access and which totally kill the performance increase of the short stroke partition. It totally depends on your usage patterns. If for example, you take a common setup of putting your OS, programs on the...
by drees
Thu Jul 16, 2009 3:59 pm
Forum: Silent Storage
Topic: Transform 'Cuda 7200.11 1.5tb into Velociraptor Killer
Replies: 78
Views: 82811

so completing our large tasks faster still won't get us back to idle state for long. The primary benefit of short stroking a drive is to reduce seek times. For example, short stroking their 450GB 15k SAS drive to 45GB cut seek times from 6ms to 3.8ms. For the 250GB 7.2k SATA drive short stroking to...
by drees
Fri Apr 10, 2009 10:16 am
Forum: Silent Storage
Topic: SSD MLC Based HD use in old laptops. Will it [STUTTER]?
Replies: 33
Views: 25463

It doesn't matter what OS you are using, you want to make sure that the filesystem data blocks are aligned to the data blocks on the SSD. I don't recall how FAT32 aligns data on the disk, so I don't know how performance will be affected by partition alignment. But for NTFS, partition alignment on SS...
by drees
Sun Apr 05, 2009 3:24 pm
Forum: Silent Storage
Topic: SSD MLC Based HD use in old laptops. Will it [STUTTER]?
Replies: 33
Views: 25463

For anyone with one of the JMicron based SSDs, you can often significantly reduce the effects of stutter so that it's often not noticable by making sure the partition is aligned on the proper boundary. For example, Vista does this by default by aligning the partitions on 1MB offsets, but older versi...
by drees
Fri Mar 27, 2009 9:18 am
Forum: SPCR Article Discussion
Topic: WD Caviar Green 2TB & Seagate Pipeline HD 500GB
Replies: 42
Views: 24490

I hope what's next is a stutterless SSD somewhere between 60-100GB at under $100. I really want an SSD for a bood/application HD. Getting close, but the OCZ Vertex 30GB is very good and can be had for about $100 right now. The 60GB can be had for about $170. Performs better than the Samsung disks. ...
by drees
Thu Mar 26, 2009 12:53 pm
Forum: SPCR Article Discussion
Topic: WD Caviar Green 2TB & Seagate Pipeline HD 500GB
Replies: 42
Views: 24490

Yeah, but now you've got double the noise, double the power and double the chance for failure leading to data loss. It's also not double the chance for failure. If we assume each drive has the same probability of failing, the chance for that one 2TB failing is the same as the chance for one of the ...
by drees
Thu Mar 26, 2009 11:46 am
Forum: SPCR Article Discussion
Topic: WD Caviar Green 2TB & Seagate Pipeline HD 500GB
Replies: 42
Views: 24490

Yeah, but now you've got double the noise.... It will not be "double" the noise. It will likely be 2-3 dBA at 1m, perhaps less, depending on environmental and installation details. Uh, isn't 3db considered "twice" as loud? 3db certainly takes twice the energy to create, even if it doesn't always so...
by drees
Thu Mar 26, 2009 10:12 am
Forum: Green Computing
Topic: "01" Watts when computer is turned off?
Replies: 15
Views: 10809

Re: "01" Watts when computer is turned off?

I rarely turn off my PC, but I did yesterday and I noticed that the power meter showed "01" Watts. If the computer is turned off shouldn't it be 0 watts ? Welcome to vampire load. If you really want something off, you have to flip the switch at the power switch or unplug it. You're lucky - many cra...
by drees
Thu Mar 26, 2009 10:09 am
Forum: SPCR Article Discussion
Topic: WD Caviar Green 2TB & Seagate Pipeline HD 500GB
Replies: 42
Views: 24490

Very impressive acoustics from the 2TB GP, especially since it has 4 platters. Really the only thing i dont like about the drive from all the reviews ive read is the very high price. Id still take 2 1TB 3 platter drives over it and save a substantial amount. Once the price drops i'll consider it. Y...
by drees
Mon Mar 16, 2009 1:57 pm
Forum: General Gallery
Topic: Silent Smoothwall
Replies: 14
Views: 14983

Nil Einne wrote:I haven't really tried pfSense but from what I can tell it doesn't support IPv6 yet (was looking in to it for testing something)
You're right - it doesn't yet. Not sure when it's scheduled to show up, either.
by drees
Wed Mar 04, 2009 10:24 pm
Forum: Green Computing
Topic: New Mac mini - <13w at idle?
Replies: 14
Views: 13627

New Mac mini - <13w at idle?

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_mini?mco=MTE3MDI Apple is claiming that it's the lowest power desktop in the world and uses less than 13w at idle. That sounds way too low, no? Has anyone been able to reach those sort of numbers with a custom build? I'd love to see their cla...
by drees
Mon Feb 09, 2009 11:16 am
Forum: SPCR Article Discussion
Topic: Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2: AMD 690G, Take 2
Replies: 65
Views: 51005

My fileserver has eight total drives: four are connected to the onboard SATA ports (i.e. AMD SB700). The other four are connected via two 2-port PCIe SATA cards (based on the Silicon Image SiI 3132 chip). Whenever I do any kind of writing to the drives attached to the add-on cards, the computer ins...
by drees
Mon Feb 02, 2009 4:41 pm
Forum: SPCR Article Discussion
Topic: Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB: The Perfect Balance?
Replies: 24
Views: 18529

^ Very suspicious that they ship in 250GB , 500GB, 750GB and 1TB capacities. Also they claim upt o 160MB/s sustained on the webpage, but the datasheet says 125... Not suspicious at all - drive manufactures have been shipping disks which only use one side of a platter for ages - I suspect that they ...
by drees
Mon Feb 02, 2009 11:14 am
Forum: Green Computing
Topic: New [NAS] build
Replies: 9
Views: 9775

illdrift - sounds like you're going down the right track. I'd like to echo andyh's concern over using a cheap mobo - I personally try to stay away from ECS boards after having some bad experiences with them. Please do make sure you go with RAID6 instead of RAID5. I've heard about too many cases of d...
by drees
Sat Jan 31, 2009 10:08 pm
Forum: Green Computing
Topic: New [NAS] build
Replies: 9
Views: 9775

My 2c: Dual-core is overkill for a NAS box, unless you're pushing multi-Gigabit speeds. Single core Athlon will be fine, or if you want dual core, use one of the BE series processors. Make sure Cool'n'Quiet is configured and works - all AMD single/dual core processors are within 5w of each other whe...
by drees
Thu Jan 22, 2009 12:29 am
Forum: Green Computing
Topic: Via Eden based NAS w/ eSata; enough oomph for gbit ethernet?
Replies: 9
Views: 11067

Typically, you are limited by these things: 1. CPU speed 2. NIC CPU offload features & driver quality From experience, like nick705 suggests, I'd guess that you'll probably only be able to push up to 30MB/s. Also important to know is the architecture of the motherboard. Hopefully the NIC and the SAT...
by drees
Wed Dec 03, 2008 1:38 am
Forum: Green Computing
Topic: test: OS power consumption
Replies: 11
Views: 16667

Given the very same hardware I see no reason why there should be any difference whatsoever in power consumption during idle. - There is no computing going on. Except that different OSes enable different kinds of background services by default, which still do stuff when the computer is otherwise idl...
by drees
Fri Jul 18, 2008 11:44 am
Forum: Cases and Damping
Topic: Modding & Cutting with Tin Snips
Replies: 93
Views: 190008

Red handle cuts to the left, green handle cuts to the right.

You can use either one in either hand depending on the type of cut you are making.
by drees
Fri Jul 11, 2008 10:08 am
Forum: CPUs and Motherboards
Topic: Will going from fx-62 to 4850e draw less power?
Replies: 13
Views: 6752

deathspared wrote:After speaking with Hauppage, turns out the Hauppage 500 dual tuner uses 12 watts.
What sucks about the Hauppauge tuners I have (I have two PVR-250s) is that they use basically the same power whether or not you are using them, approximately 10w.
by drees
Thu Jul 03, 2008 9:55 am
Forum: Green Computing
Topic: Is Going Green Really Golden?
Replies: 30
Views: 22647

I think many/most companies use the "green" label simply to sell things. My poor old aunt was talked into replacing all the older windows with new "energy-efficient" windows.....cost $13,000. When I found out and asked why, she said she'd be saving money on the utility bills. She died about 40 year...
by drees
Tue Apr 29, 2008 12:26 pm
Forum: Power Supplies
Topic: 23W savings with PSU swap
Replies: 2
Views: 2280

Nice results!

Do you know the specific model number of your old Antec?

Where did you get your Sparkle?
by drees
Fri Apr 25, 2008 12:08 am
Forum: CPUs and Motherboards
Topic: Lowest power dual-core
Replies: 41
Views: 23477

frank2003 wrote:My figures were based on my experience with 4 ATX PSUs. Maybe it was just my luck.
Maybe my Super Tornado is just more efficient that I thought it was?

What were the four PSUs you replaced?