[mythtv-users] Power Con$umption

Timo Boettcher spida at gmx.net
Thu Mar 25 04:06:47 EST 2004


Hi Rob,


* Rob Comstock <mythtv at westcoastlinux.com>, Wednesday, March 24, 2004, 11:22:05 PM:

> I just measured the power consumed by my MythTV server and
> was suprised to find it ticking away at 175 watts (24-7 of course).
> Here in California that gets pretty ugly over time. A KWh
> costs me over $0.24 so that works out to around $32 a month.
> The box is a Athlon Thunderbird 1.3G running 3 ATA disk drives (all
> 5400 RPM, two 60g and 1 180g), a matrox g400 dual head for
> TV-out (that card has a fan on it), two ethernet cards, and a
> AverMedia brooktree video capture/tuner card. 

> Does 175 w seem high to anyone else? Do other processors
> of equivelent compute power (how does a 2 gig celeron compare 
> in  performance?) take less power? Have others measured the
> power consumed by their myth boxes? if someone knows of a 
> power consumption database that already exists I could take
> a look there. Failing that if  you would like to post the power 
> numbers and the system configs I could setup a page to do 
> that.

I have tested my machine
 1 P3-933,
 2 256MB ram
 1 Maxtor 300GB Disk
 1 Matrox G550 (Fanless)
 2 PVR350
at about 65W (about 58W when idle). And that is with a
overpowered 300W Powersupply, I guess when I downgrade that to a 100W
one, I won't lose so much in heat in the PSU.

As a guide:
- Use dedicated hardware whenever possible
  (thats hardware-encoders like PVR*50 here)
- The less rotating spindles, the better
  (One big drive instead of more smaller ones)
- smallest CPU which can do what you need
  (with hardware-encoding, thats in the 500Mhz area (VIA Epia))
- Smallest possible Powersupply. The work most efficient at about 90%
  load.
 
 HTH
  
 Timo



More information about the mythtv-users mailing list