[geeks] Little Falls 2 System Power Consumpion Question

[Lionel Peterson]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: geeks-bounces at sunhelp.org [mailto:geeks-bounces at sunhelp.org] On
> Behalf Of Mark Benson
> Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 9:55 AM
> To: The Geeks List
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Little Falls 2 System Power Consumpion Question
> 
> Okay I powered it up today to play around with the video playback on
> it in Ubuntu to see what I could get to work. I'm so far pretty
> impressed.

They are pretty nice little boards, esp. at $75-85 incl. CPU...
 
> Anyhoo, I've got a Watt Meter on the plug to see what it's power draw
> is like and I think the whole system peaked at 58W. That's too much
> for a 60W brick, for sure. It's currently running off a 200W (output)
> Mini-ATX power supply, what does that mean as far as the power
> calibration is concerned? I'd have think a Pico + brick will pull
> slightly more maybe as the components are hotter and under more
> stress? I'm not that big an expert on these matters.

Don't forget to consider PSU efficiency - that PS may only be 65-75%
efficient, so as much as 1/3rd of the power may be lost to an inefficient
PSU, and the 60 Watt Pico may be fine.

> One warning I will issue as regards the Little Falls 2 board is my dad
> and I found on our other system that lives in the kitchen in a little
> case, a 80W PSU is touch-and-go, more on the side of stop, actually,
> if you hang a 2.5" SATA internal drive, IDE laptop CD, 11g Wireless
> USB dongle, 2.5" USB2.0 hard drive off it. We had serious issue with
> the machine fruiting a loop when it started accessing the hard drive
> and doing graphics (rendering a screensaver) at the same time in XP
> Home. Was going nuts, picture was blacking out and it was getting real
> hot (the air coming out of the fan was at least - probably the PSU).
> We unplugged the USB gear and it's okay now, so we popped a powered
> hub on it and all seems well now (knock on wood).

The Intel MBs are very stable, and don't "fall over" as you describe (in my
experience, but of course, YMMV - I don't use any cases smaller than uATX,
so I don't have heat issues...

> While I have mine on at the moment I had a listen for the fan  noise
> and actually most of the annoying noise is coming off the 945 chipset
> cooler.  The PSU noise is low frequency so it's not as noticeable, but
> slowing the PSU fan down with my hand doesn't cut much of the noise
> out in fact. It's almost all high-pitch whine off the little 945
> chipset fan.

Have you tried moving the chipset fan to the other fan header and playing
with fan control settings in BIOS? I think I read about folks doing that on
various blog entries about this particular board - others discuss swapping
the fan out...

> I have a little 20mm Rasurbo quit(er) fan that may fit, gonna try that
> when i've finished installing the 302 updates on Ubuntu :)

Try moving the fan wire first, that may be enough to quiet down the system.

Lionel