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help me design a really low power machine

FLECOM

FLECOM

Modder(ator) & [H]ardest Folder Evar
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I need a really really low power machine, its not so much for DC (it will be folding) but will also be doing telemetry logging and i need it to run off of a battery bank for extended periods of times during extended power outages etc...

I already have a 200w DC>DC ATX powersupply now i just need everything else... are the VIA's still the best? or is there something that can get me almost as low usage without sucking so much speed wise?
 
I know via just came out with another low power board recently, at a smaller size, i think it was a front page story :\

I'm a bit out of the loop but they probably will still be best, or if you can find one of those geodes off ebay or similar (i think they stoped making them)
 
If price is no option then you could try to find a Pentium M and one of those desktop boards with the mobile chipset. The boards a sickly expensive though if I remember right. Via won't give you much cpu speed but they sip power, maybe less than the centrino platform.
 
if you go with via then i would say not to use it for folding. but like someone mentioned you could break the bank and get a mobile platform. you could always buy a used piii lappy and use that. it also sounds like it needs to be a serious efficient setup to run off batts for long periods of time. you should really consider NOT running F@H on it. what ever setup you do end up getting it would NOT be in your best interest to run F@H on it. you have to draw the line somewhere;)
 
You'll need to provide a little more information:
1) how much computing power do you need? Is it just taking a reading and sending it down an ethernet cable?
2) how long is an "extended period"? A couple hours? A couple days? Weeks? Months?

You might consider looking for something outside the realm of the PC. A small, embedded processor or AVR or PIC platform might be sufficient and take zero power.

If you're looking for a PC-based platform, then yes, VIA is still the leader for fairly-low-cost small boards. I'll second the P-III Laptop idea as well. If you can, get a Coppermine core with the "E" suffix or a LV Tulatin core--both of those are at or under 15W. A laptop will also have the mobile chipset and power-saving features. And there's lots you can do to a laptop to lower its power consumption below what it was originally intended, like physically unplugging the screen, using a CF card instead of a hard drive, disabling as much hardware as you can, using the minimum number of SODIMMs, etc.
 
FLECOM,

What's your budget. Your best option is probably to buy a new or used laptop. My Turion laptop runs less than 35 watts at the plug with the monitor on. Depending on usage, you are looking at 4-6 hours just running off the battery, and a reasonable UPS could, most probably, easily get you to 24 hours up-time.
 
We just started getting Lenovo T60's at work...sexy little beast with very nice battery life.
 
Hito has the best bet. Get a notebook the a Turion TL-64 (this is a 35w 2.2ghz 64bit dual core) a HP Pavilion dv9000z series with the monitor on and 100% on both cores would draw around 50-60w.(running smp linux will score you 850ppd)
 
[BRO]Alaskan;1030697872 said:
Hito has the best bet. Get a notebook the a Turion TL-64 (this is a 35w 2.2ghz 64bit dual core) a HP Pavilion dv9000z series with the monitor on and 100% on both cores would draw around 50-60w.(running smp linux will score you 850ppd)
Click to expand...
FLECOM might not need that much (electrical and processing) power, though, particularly if all he's doing is telemetry. That's why we need more information.
 
I've got a M10000 setup that uses < 40w at the wall, plugged into a battery backup. They are great for low power operations, but absolutely terrible to fold on. I don't even bother folding on mine, as it takes a month to return a unit, and slows ssh(it's running openbsd) to a crawl.
 
the software its running is weather display (http://www.weather-display.com/index.php)

right now its on a PIII 1ghz machine with 256mb ram and its kind of sluggish, so i was looking for something with at least a little more pep

i have seen those "mobile" motherboards but i cant really afford that, is there any regular (reasonable?) motherboard that will accept like an turion or something like that?

my setup for the machine right now is a 12v ATX powersupply hooked to a pair of 24ah batteries... it runs the p3 for a few days, but thats with a desktop drive and pci video capture card

the laptop could work, i could get a P3m laptop motherboard for cheap, but then i would need a usb video capture card or something...
 
Depending on how well the weather display is programmed (and in what language), it *could* be maxing out your CPU, but I'm unconvinced. Assuming your current CPU is up to the task, I'd second K*'s suggestion and look at your RAM usage. You definitely won't get better performance out of a VIA mini-ITX board, unfortunately.

If your CPU is the bottleneck, then you're stuck with moving up in speed. And in order to keep power under control, that means a laptop, probably with a Pentium-M.
 
I think a cheap way to do it would be to use a Sempron and underclock and undervolt it. Use a board with as few features as possible, but make sure it can undervolt the cpu. Slap in an old 2mb pci graphics card or something to save power on graphics.

If you could find a Pentium M board that allows you to undervolt, that would probably work even better. Also some laptops you can undervolt via software if you want to go that route. There's NHC (notebook hardware control) and possibly some other software that you can undervolt some laptops. Centrino platforms are almost guaranteed to be able to undervolt via NHC.

Any laptop with a ULV processor would be great, but they seem to be very costly. It's basically a pre underclocked and undervolted cpu.

To save even more power you could use a flash adapter to plug in a flash card and use it as a hard drive. You may want to turn off the swap file if you do this though, to save unnecessary writes to the flash memory. I believe you can get these adapters for laptops as well as desktops.

Hope that helps :)



 
since ppl have brought up undervolting then i have always like the abit NF7-S and barton combo. a mobile barton would work best but any barton with the option to change multi's would be good too. get it to 1.4ghz, set all the voltage options to the lowest possible settings, underclock the ram, disable any other options you don't need, get a cheap agp card and your set. i just can't guess if it will be any better power wise compared to your piii setup. you could also try using a lappy hd to shave off a watt or two.

i also like the idea that someone mentioned regarding more ram. that may very well solve your problem and you could still keep your piii setup. you could always add the lappy hd too:D
 
Mohonri said:
Depending on how well the weather display is programmed (and in what language), it *could* be maxing out your CPU, but I'm unconvinced. Assuming your current CPU is up to the task, I'd second K*'s suggestion and look at your RAM usage. You definitely won't get better performance out of a VIA mini-ITX board, unfortunately.

If your CPU is the bottleneck, then you're stuck with moving up in speed. And in order to keep power under control, that means a laptop, probably with a Pentium-M.
Click to expand...

the app has a lot of other apps it launches, there is the actual weather display program itself... there is a program to upload data to my webserver (almost realtime) there is a program to upload the data to weather underground... a program to take snapshots from a video capture card etc... so the machine sits at around 12&#37; most of the time, every now and then it will sit there going betwene 75% and 100% for a few seconds then back to around 12% ~ 28%... memory seems short, its using like 250mb of pagefile and has like 20mb of free physical memory...

so i think im going to look into a laptop motherboard with more ram, how are p3m's power and performance wise? i can get some laptop boards with p3m 1.2ghz cpu's for a decent price... (like $50 + ram)

although that box ICE_9 posted seems nice... with a cpu and ram they are under $400 (i can get a laptop drive :) )
 
Why not just look outside to see what the weather is like?

:p
 
The thing will getting it converted to straight DC. I have been looking for about a day now for specifics on just the power supply. Nobody has even go a closeup shot of it. I can't find anything. I may just end up getting a spare one for $35 bucks and doing my research there.
 
FLECOM said:
the app has a lot of other apps it launches, there is the actual weather display program itself... there is a program to upload data to my webserver (almost realtime) there is a program to upload the data to weather underground... a program to take snapshots from a video capture card etc... so the machine sits at around 12% most of the time, every now and then it will sit there going betwene 75% and 100% for a few seconds then back to around 12% ~ 28%... memory seems short, its using like 250mb of pagefile and has like 20mb of free physical memory...

so i think im going to look into a laptop motherboard with more ram, how are p3m's power and performance wise? i can get some laptop boards with p3m 1.2ghz cpu's for a decent price... (like $50 + ram)

although that box ICE_9 posted seems nice... with a cpu and ram they are under $400 (i can get a laptop drive :) )
Click to expand...

Pentium M's are like enhanced Pentium 3's, but they use DDR memory instead of PC133. Pentium M's should be slightly faster clock for clock than a Pentium 3.

I would recommend against getting a Celeron M. The main difference between a Celeron M and Pentium M is the Celeron M does not support speedstep.. This means it will not lower voltage and clock speed automatically when cpu usage is not high.



 
ICE_9 said:
The thing will getting it converted to straight DC. I have been looking for about a day now for specifics on just the power supply. Nobody has even go a closeup shot of it. I can't find anything. I may just end up getting a spare one for $35 bucks and doing my research there.
Click to expand...

that box runs of 19v at 3.something amps... so you will need some sort of small DC>DC converter or buck/boost circuit of some kind...

most (real) car laptop adapters should be up to the task with little modification

something like

http://cgi.ebay.com/DC-Car-PlaneTos...4QQihZ005QQcategoryZ42165QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
 
As an eBay Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
FLECOM said:
the app has a lot of other apps it launches, there is the actual weather display program itself... there is a program to upload data to my webserver (almost realtime) there is a program to upload the data to weather underground... a program to take snapshots from a video capture card etc... so the machine sits at around 12&#37; most of the time, every now and then it will sit there going betwene 75% and 100% for a few seconds then back to around 12% ~ 28%... memory seems short, its using like 250mb of pagefile and has like 20mb of free physical memory...

so i think im going to look into a laptop motherboard with more ram, how are p3m's power and performance wise? i can get some laptop boards with p3m 1.2ghz cpu's for a decent price... (like $50 + ram)
Click to expand...
The PentiumM was based off the P3 architecture, so you can probably safely assume the performance will scale accordingly. It sounds, though, like you actually have more power than you need, and that you could actually go with a slower processor and still have enough. Before you do anything else, I'd add some RAM and see if that improves your performance. If it does, then you know how much RAM you need and the maximum CPU you'll need. If you look at electrical specifications, the lower-end P3E's drew as little as 15W, and the LV P3's drew as little as ten at 800MHz, which would still be plenty for this application. For mobile-Pentium-III, make sure you get a Tulatin core. Those are also in the 10-15W range starting at 933MHz.
 
I think you should get a mobile XP Barton and undervolt it. Even underclocked and undervolted it would blow the doors off the PIII. You may need to do some research on what mobo will support it correctly, though.

 
If you want to build your own low power system you can use an AMD 754 MB like the Asus K8N-VM (it has built on 6100 graphics and is low power ~$70) and use a AMD Turion x2 (31W) procesor ~$250 or a single core 2.0ghz ~$90 and keep the total system below 60-70W Without knowing how much power you want/need its hard to recoment the right processor
 
Mohonri said:
The PentiumM was based off the P3 architecture, so you can probably safely assume the performance will scale accordingly. It sounds, though, like you actually have more power than you need, and that you could actually go with a slower processor and still have enough. Before you do anything else, I'd add some RAM and see if that improves your performance. If it does, then you know how much RAM you need and the maximum CPU you'll need. If you look at electrical specifications, the lower-end P3E's drew as little as 15W, and the LV P3's drew as little as ten at 800MHz, which would still be plenty for this application. For mobile-Pentium-III, make sure you get a Tulatin core. Those are also in the 10-15W range starting at 933MHz.
Click to expand...

do you know if the P3M in the dell C610s was a Tulatin core? those boards seem to be pretty cheap (~$50) so i could pickup a 512mb stick and one of those boards real cheap... plus the DC adapter for them is fairly common so thats a plus too :)

if I could get the whole machine around 30~40 watts that would be awesome cause I could hook a 75 watt PV module to the battery plant and have it run for a really really long time hehe
 
FLECOM said:
do you know if the P3M in the dell C610s was a Tulatin core? those boards seem to be pretty cheap (~$50) so i could pickup a 512mb stick and one of those boards real cheap... plus the DC adapter for them is fairly common so thats a plus too
Click to expand...
Yes, it's a Tualatin (hey, I spelled it right this time!). Only the Tualatins went up to 1.2GHz and higher. Although that's huge overkill on your processing requirements. I'd suggest you try and underclock it if possible to save a little more on power. Just drop the bus speed from 133 to 100 or 66.
 
My vote goes to a sempron setup. I believe they make 35w semps, and you could undervolt and underclock it from there to get it even lower if need be. Combine it with say a Biostar T-Force motherboard .Solid board, should allow you to underclock, and you get onboard video, which will save some juice also.
 
I have a slimline hp that has a turion in it I would be willing to part with for under $400, I will post specs over the weekend if you can wait that long.
 
Gambit said:
I'm not sure of what your storage requirements are or if it would even help, but perhaps you could go with a puck drive instead of a full internal.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148132
Click to expand...

i was thinking of just using a laptop drive since they are fairly easy to get and my space requirements are about 30gb~

nothingtrend said:
I have a slimline hp that has a turion in it I would be willing to part with for under $400, I will post specs over the weekend if you can wait that long.
Click to expand...

sure why not, i havent had time to do anything lately so a prebuilt box might be just the thing to actually get me to do something computer related
 
Personally, I would look at silentpcreview.com. I know they have lots of information on underclocking and lower power components.
 
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