This article at Toms Hardware maybe of interest, it discusses power consumption with onboard graphics and using graphics cards.
Dual Core Intel Processors For Low-Power, High-Performance Desktops and compares them to the AMD's Turion 64.

Andy

This article at Toms Hardware maybe of interest, it discusses power consumption with onboard graphics and using graphics cards.
Dual Core Intel Processors For Low-Power, High-Performance Desktops and compares them to the AMD's Turion 64.

Andy

The THG article is a bit dated, though:

- Core duo boards with onboard graphics have been available for several months now.
(Mains power consumption of a T2400 system is about 75W when crunching 2 seti WUs)

- The first dual core Turions are showing up in the online shops


Regargds Hans

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This article at Toms Hardware maybe of interest, it discusses power consumption with onboard graphics and using graphics cards.
Dual Core Intel Processors For Low-Power, High-Performance Desktops and compares them to the AMD's Turion 64.

Andy

The THG article is a bit dated, though:

- Core duo boards with onboard graphics have been available for several months now.
(Mains power consumption of a T2400 system is about 75W when crunching 2 seti WUs)

- The first dual core Turions are showing up in the online shops


Regargds Hans

I realise that but most of them,like most of the Pent M mobo's are built with desktop, high wattage, chipsets. You have to look closely at the mobo spec's if you want a realy low wattage machine.

My pent M desktop takes 68.4 Watts from the socket if I didn't have the 6600 graphics card in. It uses 76 watts with the graphics card and screensave to blank screen.

A different computer I built for a friend who wanted games performance uses mobo with desktop chipset and 7800 graphics uses nearly 100 watts when crunching units.

Andy

This article at Toms Hardware maybe of interest, it discusses power consumption with onboard graphics and using graphics cards.
Dual Core Intel Processors For Low-Power, High-Performance Desktops and compares them to the AMD's Turion 64.

Andy

The THG article is a bit dated, though:

- Core duo boards with onboard graphics have been available for several months now.
(Mains power consumption of a T2400 system is about 75W when crunching 2 seti WUs)

- The first dual core Turions are showing up in the online shops


Regargds Hans

The AMD Turion 64 X2 has a new socket called socket S1. But there are no socket S1 mainboards available and S1 is not compatible with AM2.

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You know those 12 volt solar powered car battery chargers?

Get 10, hook them up to an inverter and you can power your PC off the sun......

You will have to find a single array that can produce the current you need. This is for the electrically non-savvy: arrays in series will increase the voltage...in parallel gives you higher amperage.

Is it expensive? Sure, initially....but be an accountant not a bean-counter and look at the long run....

Plus look how much less carbon your demand will introduce into the atmosphere.

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You know those 12 volt solar powered car battery chargers?

Get 10, hook them up to an inverter and you can power your PC off the sun......

You will have to find a single array that can produce the current you need. This is for the electrically non-savvy: arrays in series will increase the voltage...in parallel gives you higher amperage.

Is it expensive? Sure, initially....but be an accountant not a bean-counter and look at the long run....

Plus look how much less carbon your demand will introduce into the atmosphere.

If you search carefully you can find Power supplies that work directly from 12 or 24 volts, that means you can eliminate the inverter and save on the losses for that item.

Andy

You know those 12 volt solar powered car battery chargers?

Get 10, hook them up to an inverter and you can power your PC off the sun......

You will have to find a single array that can produce the current you need. This is for the electrically non-savvy: arrays in series will increase the voltage...in parallel gives you higher amperage.

Is it expensive? Sure, initially....but be an accountant not a bean-counter and look at the long run....

Plus look how much less carbon your demand will introduce into the atmosphere.

Even better: get an electric motor and two alternators -- drive the alternators off of the motor and hook up the output from one alternator to run the motor. You can use the other alternator to run your PC.

But seriously, you'll need some fairly large panels -- the small "battery charger" panels are big enough to make up for battery leakage and whatever else your car needs while parked, and that just isn't much power at all.

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But seriously, you'll need some fairly large panels -- the small "battery charger" panels are big enough to make up for battery leakage and whatever else your car needs while parked, and that just isn't much power at all.

I'd need about 100 square meters to supply my farm :o)

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You know those 12 volt solar powered car battery chargers?

Get 10, hook them up to an inverter and you can power your PC off the sun......

You will have to find a single array that can produce the current you need. This is for the electrically non-savvy: arrays in series will increase the voltage...in parallel gives you higher amperage.

Is it expensive? Sure, initially....but be an accountant not a bean-counter and look at the long run....

Plus look how much less carbon your demand will introduce into the atmosphere.

Even better: get an electric motor and two alternators -- drive the alternators off of the motor and hook up the output from one alternator to run the motor. You can use the other alternator to run your PC.

But seriously, you'll need some fairly large panels -- the small "battery charger" panels are big enough to make up for battery leakage and whatever else your car needs while parked, and that just isn't much power at all.

I wasn't talking abt those little trickle charger panels...you can get 1 amp panels for not much more.

And while we're on the subject of electricity...

Wattage is merely a unit of HEAT disappation. It is contemporarily used incorrectly.

James Watt, the Scottish inventor who defined the unit of heat in relation to the production of kinetic power from a steam engine, used this to accurately state how much heat was required to boil a certain amount of water to produce one horsepower.

Incidentally, horsepower is a linear function, not a circular one of torque, which is what electric motors produce. Terming a power supply in wattege means you're producing 600 watts of heat and nothing else is being done. resistors are rated in watts, which tells you how much heat the resistor can disappate w/o breaking down.

You actually are only charged for current used...not voltage..unless your power factor is out of whack(which is why some production facilities pay such high rates: they don't pf correct). That's why a 240 volt ac unit is cheaper to operate than a 120.

So, the correct terminology is volt-amps.

Since I power-factor corrected at all inductive sources in my home, my bill has dropped considerably. One could over excite the field of a synchronous motor and cause it to act in a capacitive fashion...drive it off a frequency drive so the field is automatically adjusted to one's needs moment to moment....

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Hmmm, strictly speaking Watts are a unit of power. Heat is one way the power manifests itself in the physical world.

If all the energy was dissipated as heat, then incandescent lamps would give off no visible light, cars would not move when the engine was running, RF transmitters would not send a signal for the receiver to pick up, etc. IOW, some of the energy must go to the work the device was intended to perform.

Alinator

A horsepower is 550 foot-pounds of work per second or 33,000 per minute. A watt is one joule per second or one newton-meter per second. A horsepower is about 0.746 kilowatt. Torque is something completely different - it is a measure of twisting action and can be measured in pounds-feet or newton-meters. But- torque acting through an angle can be expressed as work. For example a newton-meter of torque acting around a revolution requires 6.28 (two pi radians) joules of work. A horsepower-hour is 2545 Btus of heat; a kilowatt hour is 3415 Btus. A Btu (British thermal unit) is the amount of heat required to heat a pound of water one degree Fahrenheit; a kilocalorie (which is what dietitians call a calorie) is the amount of heat required to heat a kilogram of water one degree Celsius and is equal to about 3.968 Btus. Above is from memory and Machinerys Handbook 18 Edition, 1969, by Oberg and Jones. I suppose the heat generated by the processor is the same heat generated by current flowing through a resistor. In motors, hysteresis is one thing that causes heat. If the voltage and current are out-of-phase the power factor is less than one and the volt-amps is greater than the watts.

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Agreed, and that's what I took exception to. In physics, power is a measurement of work done or energy transfered per unit time. However, the original arguement implied that heat was the only form energy could take and that's just plain incorrect. Since any form of energy can be represented as an equivalent value of another form, this was an inappropriate "bending" of the semantics of heat.

There was one other comment which bothered me. This was the electrical examples offered.

First off, you are *not* billed for electricity based on current alone. If this was the case you would be charged on a per coulomb (electrical charge) basis, since amperes are defined as coulombs per second. You are billed in KWH precisely for the reason that it *is* a measurement of the "effort" or work it took the utility to generate the electricity you used. The effects of reactive power from the source's POV cannot be overlooked, which is why watthour meters typically have a correction factor builtin to compensate for this effect depending on their intended usage.

Second, the analogy of the A/C unit is completely ridiculous. For an ideal machine of a rated power, there is absolutely no difference from an efficiency POV to whether it runs at 1 volt, 115 volts, 230 volts, or even 1,000,000 volts.

The impact to a *real* machine is that as the rated power increases you gain in efficiency with a higher operating voltage due to a reduction in the I squared R losses in the machine, which in this case does manifest itself as heat, and waste heat at that.

Alinator

.......

James Watt, the Scottish inventor who defined the unit of heat in relation to the production of kinetic power

James Watt was British. He was was born in Scotland; a part of Great Britain. He lived and worked in Scotland and England i.e. Great Britain.

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Speaking of cost...

The total work units that were invalid due whatever error (throughout my crunching history starting last year) and gotten zero credits, but time was spent nonetheless; the total time spent for invalid work units with errors is 570,519.47 seconds. That's for 165 WU.

At 21 cents (USD) per hour (I'm ignoring the 30 cents per hour on my latest bill), the total cost for errored out work units is $6.66. It gives ya the creeps, eh? LOL


Them bloody errors... costing
$6.66

The errors is ok, but the exact cost bothers me. AHHH!!! I'm just hoping the 21 cents per hour average is not correct. :( (It is an estimated average.)

I wasn't talking abt those little trickle charger panels...you can get 1 amp panels for not much more.

1 amp at 12 volts is not all that much -- about 12 watts (or if you prefer, 12 volt-amps). It'd take 5 of those to run a typical incandescent light-bulb.

As an aside, I just replaced the factory batteries in my UPS with something a little larger -- 75 amp-hours at 48 volts gives my server farm 6 hours on batteries. There are six machines, some of them slightly power hungry.

So, 300 amp/hours at 48v to cover one day. If you figure five hours of solid output from solar panels, you'd need panels good for 60 amps (at 48v), so take these and that looks like 40 panels, roughly 20" by 40"

Or, about 80 of those 1 watt panels to take one machine off grid.

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Ned
I think your maths is about right, that was why I suggested if anybody is serious about using alternative power sources such as solar panels or small wind turbines I would suggest running the computer directly from DC so that the 'DC to AC' in inverter and AC to DC at i/p stage of computer power supply are eliminated along with all there losses, and potential faults.
I think you could then reduce your power requirements to about 60%.
I would also consider only using mobile cpu's and mobo's built with mobile chipsets, like pent M and Aopen i915Mm - HFS, which would use less than 60 VA to crunch, about the same as a light bulb.

Andy

I wouldn't know how to do that WinterKnight, If and when I do have solar panels for the house($20,500 was the estimate), They would be making power and converting It into AC and feeding It to the grid so that I would have no bill or a very small one at the very least. Oh and there would be no batteries either.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

.......
James Watt, the Scottish inventor who defined the unit of heat in relation to the production of kinetic power

James Watt was British. He was was born in Scotland; a part of Great Britain. He lived and worked in Scotland and England i.e. Great Britain.

You must be a Pom. I know a few Scotts & they prefer not to acknowledge the greater Britain.
:-)

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Grant
Darwin NT

I wouldn't know how to do that WinterKnight, If and when I do have solar panels for the house($20,500 was the estimate), They would be making power and converting It into AC and feeding It to the grid so that I would have no bill or a very small one at the very least. Oh and there would be no batteries either.

You would use the DC output of the solar panels or wind geneartor to charge batteries, and connect you computer modified with a 12 or 24 volt DC input Power supply (DC/DC convertor), to the batteries. A google for '24v dc input ATX psu' will find companies that make/sell suitable power supplies, there are also companies that make computers with DC inputs usually ~18V, but the input spec is usually quite wide like 15 to 30 Volts.

typical conections

solar panel______batteries_________inverter___________computer psu
24V DC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24V dc to 110V AC . . . . . . (normal)

or

Solar Panel______batteries__________24V i/p Computer psu

the efficiency of the inverter is about 70% and there are losses, 5 to 10 watts, at the input of the normal computer supply to convert to the AC input to DC.

So, first with inverter, for computer requiring 210 watts out of the psu, as average psu is 70% efficient and inverter is 70% efficient and batteries require 14 hour charge for quoted 10 hour output rating you solar panel would require a daily output of over 600 watts. Assuming 6 hrs/day with good output that would be rating of 2400 watts or 100amps at 24 volts. batteries would have to be of 1000 amperehour min. As charging period is only 6 hours the solar panels would be reuired to give about 150 amps output.

With 24 volt i/p psu, no inverter losses, solar panel output would go direct to psu for 6 hours/day, but would also have to charge batteries during this period. Power supply would require ~12 amps and about 70 amps would be required to charge the batteries.

Therefore the solar panel output could be cut to about 100 watts or 2/3 of inverter system and battery size could be cut by similar amount. But you would require a large battery charger for rainy days.

Thats my thoughts on the systems.

Andy

I wouldn't know how to do that WinterKnight, If and when I do have solar panels for the house($20,500 was the estimate), They would be making power and converting It into AC and feeding It to the grid so that I would have no bill or a very small one at the very least. Oh and there would be no batteries either.

You would use the DC output of the solar panels or wind geneartor to charge batteries, and connect you computer modified with a 12 or 24 volt DC input Power supply (DC/DC convertor), to the batteries. A google for '24v dc input ATX psu' will find companies that make/sell suitable power supplies, there are also companies that make computers with DC inputs usually ~18V, but the input spec is usually quite wide like 15 to 30 Volts.

typical conections

solar panel______batteries_________inverter___________computer psu
24V DC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24V dc to 110V AC . . . . . . (normal)

or
I
Solar Panel______batteries__________24V i/p Computer psu

the efficiency of the inverter is about 70% and there are losses, 5 to 10 watts, at the input of the normal computer supply to convert to the AC input to DC.

So, first with inverter, for computer requiring 210 watts out of the psu, as average psu is 70% efficient and inverter is 70% efficient and batteries require 14 hour charge for quoted 10 hour output rating you solar panel would require a daily output of over 600 watts. Assuming 6 hrs/day with good output that would be rating of 2400 watts or 100amps at 24 volts. batteries would have to be of 1000 amperehour min. As charging period is only 6 hours the solar panels would be reuired to give about 150 amps output.

With 24 volt i/p psu, no inverter losses, solar panel output would go direct to psu for 6 hours/day, but would also have to charge batteries during this period. Power supply would require ~12 amps and about 70 amps would be required to charge the batteries.

Therefore the solar panel output could be cut to about 100 watts or 2/3 of inverter system and battery size could be cut by similar amount. But you would require a large battery charger for rainy days.

Thats my thoughts on the systems.

Andy

Thanks for Your thoughts, But as I said, I don't plan on batteries as they are an unneeded cost and expensive to replace one day, As the panels are to power the whole house, So I'd rather go without the batteries, As I'd rather feed the grid and get a credit of 100% or very close to It on My bill and I'll have 0.19 acres to do It with. And I was told the lot size I'm buying is fine for making enough electicity to give Me a zero dollar SCE(Electric) bill, But before doing It I would need a months worth of electical usage to see how many panels I'd need(good thing this is the desert, 14 hour days in summer and 11.5 hours a day in winter with hardly any clouds), Oh and the house is or will be heated with natural gas as is done out here.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's