PM for 2 tubs
(snip)Perhaps you can all help out by coming up wth interesting & amusing "bump posts".(snip)
Uh, I'm also building a computer that'll consume less power than a light bulb when not in heavy use.
Out of curiosity, are you building such a computer with readily available parts? What kind of wattage are you aiming for?
I'm aiming for about 20-30w when idle and about 50w at most when in use.
There are systems that can go down to 18w when idle, I'm not sure what the draw is when they're under load, though. I'm getting the parts from http://www.mini-box.com and http://www.minipc.ca/. Unfortunatley, since I'm currently working on another system at the moment I had to swear to my wife that this project wouldn't officially start till either Q4/2008 or 2009. hehe
Wow pretty amazing stuff, I've been thinking about building a low power home server PC for an internal network. I was going to cannibalize this computer because my 3800+ X2 (S939), is capable of running 1.0-2.0ghz on 1.1V. It can run easily under full load with a passive cooler, and I hadn't even begun testing lower voltages yet... However even if I did convert it, the power draw would still easily exceed 100W idle. Of course even then it'd still pack a lot more raw power than one of those mini-ITX's.
It's too bad my project will never materialize because all SFF S939 mobos, or S939 platforms in general, have all but vaporized and are nowhere to be found.
In anycase, I digress, the main reason why I want to build a very low voltage computer is due to my dissatisfaction with the performance of my router. Let's face it, these little computers are simply too handicapped for serious throughput. Even the most powerful (what I could expect to buy) routers only support some 128 connections. That and I also want to add some network hard drives. While they're cheap and readily available solutions, they're all watered down products when compared to a real machine.
On the subject of cheap and readily available, I know you're not looking for it, but... check out the NSLU2 (pricing here (great site to price-compare in Canada, by the way)) and NSLU2-Linux. It's actually pretty full-featured as far as cheap solutions go. You get your traffic shaping, NAS, and you can even turn it into a reasonable Asterisk server.
I'd post a longer reply but I'm at work.![]()