[geeks] New Intel Atom-based barebones system

[Mark]

On 15 Aug 2008, at 15:47, Jonathan Groll wrote:

> Not sure if the current Atom motherboards can be classed as ruthlessly
> efficient. There are a few sites on the net that have found that
> performance per watt is not as good as for Pentium-M chips:
> http://tinyurl.com/5nu83h

That's to be expected, the chipset and mainboard are not optimal at  
present.

It's still a lit more efficient than a Core 2 Duo pulling 18W onto the  
CPU and running that damned great Intel cooler :P

> Don't get me wrong, I love my D945GCLF. Since it's on anyway all the
> time I don't really mind if it takes twice as long to transcode.

Transcoding isn't realtime though. I want playback realtime decoding.  
The current Atom isn't so good at that.

> I am just a little bit disappointed that the whole motherboard and  
> chip
> consume about 41W of power when the procesor only takes 4W of that - I
> suspect it may be better with future Atom's though.

That's ruthlessly efficient compared to my Mac Pro, I think that pulls  
off about 500-600W (4 65nm cores, 4 HDDs, 1 GF8800GT and 4 fans) ;)

> The cost of the power supply can be quite considerable. I paid $75 for
> an M2-ATX 200W DC-DC power supply for mine - so the MSI offering is
> very well priced indeed.

Yeh, decent wattage power bricks are surprisingly expensive, actually.

-- 
Mark Benson

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