[mythtv-users] Energe Conservation, was: Happy Anniversary

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Fri Sep 22 21:20:13 UTC 2006



On Sep 22, 2006, at 3:05 PM, Henry A Harper III wrote:

>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org
>> [mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org]On Behalf Of Steven Adeff
>> Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 1:52 PM
>> To: Discussion about mythtv
>> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Happy Anniversary
>>
> [...snip...]
>> The problem is, even at idle modern CPU's still use somewhere around
>> 100-150W (from what I remember reading at TomsHardware). I don't  
>> quite
>> know how suspend works, but I assume it basically "turns off" the  
>> CPU,
>>
>
> I guess that depends on what exactly you mean by "modern CPU" :)
>
> My mythbox has a 65W (max) Athlon 64 x2 4600+...the whole box does  
> put out a
> little more heat than my HDDirectTivo but not a whole lot more.
>

The most power-hungry CPUs consume about 115 watts I believe, but  
they can be clocked down to slower speeds to reduce that. The trend  
seems to be for less power-hungry CPUs though, the .65 process chips  
draw less than the .90 ones for the same performance as an example.

The nVidia video cards are pretty power hungry, as is RAM. I have a  
6800 card that gets very hot but even the 5200s get fairly warm.

I don't know how much power capture cards with hardware encoding  
consume, but they seem to get pretty warm. My PVR-350 has a heatsink  
on the video chip.

Myth backends are certainly not low power devices, but some frontend  
configurations can be so.


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