[geeks] Little Falls 2 System Power Consumpion Question

[Mark Benson]

On 13 Dec 2008, at 03:23, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> 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.

Well I'll have it apart tomorrow so I'll hook the Pico, the brick and  
the computer up to a Watt meter and see what it does, if it's pulling  
any more than 45W idle it's a no go in my book.

> 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...

Heat wasn't the primary issue (it was resultant from the primary  
issue), the issue was the PSU (a 80 Watt DC-DC board) was suffering  
voltage sag under, or was just plain overloaded, as a result of the  
load from the USB ports.

Intel boards are very stable but even a very stable board will not  
function if the voltages fall outside the design limits, or the PSU is  
not able to push enough electrons down the wires. Any computer without  
sufficient electrical input cannot function correctly, end of  
argument :)

The problem was not the board's fault, I was just making folks aware  
that, on a DC-DC 80 Watt board (although it could be a cheap and nasty  
DC-DC board admittedly) heavy load on the USB ports may cause power  
shortages resulting in system instability, through no fault of Intel,  
just that some PSUs are better than others.

> 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 didn't know you could do that, thanks for the heads up :)

-- 
Mark Benson

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