[geeks] Little Falls 2 System Power Consumpion Question

[Mark Benson]

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 :)

-- 
Mark Benson

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"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."