[geeks] New Intel Atom-based barebones system

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Aug 15, 2008, at 10:59 , Mark wrote:

>> 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) ;)

I have the same machine, and I am pulling 221 watts right now with a  
couple dozen programs loaded, so I'd say you are exaggerating a bit on  
power usage.

You can get several programs that will read wattage sensors in the Pro  
and report how much juice each CPU, memory stick, power supply, etc  
are sucking up.

If I fire up BOINC and push the CPUs a bit more, I run up to 250 watts.

Unfortunately, I don't have a program which will print Mac power usage  
to a console so I can see how much it eats when running apps where I  
cannot see the little power usage widget.

221 watts is less power than my Opteron PC, which is just dual-core,  
and not as fast, so I don't really see the Mac Pro as that much of a  
hog when you consider the power it has.

Also, it goes to sleep instantly and perfectly, while my PC has never  
quite mastered that, so the PC eats a lot more power overall than my  
Mac does.

Just as a point of reference, my "Wintendo" can eat 400 watts playing  
Oblivion or Neverwinter Nights 2.


-- 
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."