Hi,
On Wed, Apr 11 at 11:24, Gordon Scott wrote:
...
> I'd been thinking of buying a small ITX system, preferable fan-free,
> for a reasonable minimal ecological footprint and minimal noise.
>
> But I have sitting here an old 166MHz Cyrix box and a 66MHz 486 box.
> Bying an ITX implies probably binning those. These would both need new
> disc drives. The Cyrix is an AT, IIRC the 486 is an ATX.
>
> Does anyone have any ojective information on the relative merits of a
> new 60W ITX over keeping the old slow machines?
I don't have any ecological data on the effect of buying new efficient
over reusing old inefficient.
On buying a new box I do have some power consumption figures. These
are measured at the mains inlet to various configurations and don't
include any monitor. 1W consumed 24/7/365 comes to 8.75kWh per year.
Old ATX PC (266MHz PII) 45W
EPIA 1GHz fanless MB in same box 35W
EPIA fanless in Morex Venus box 30W
Lex Light (CF booting 533MHz) 11W
With money to spend today for a conventional PC structure I'd probably
put together the following.
Jetway 1.2GHz fanless motherboard (J7F2WE1G2E) these are cheaper and
lower power consumption that the equivalent EPIA board. Plus have a
range of interesting daughter boards.
Travla C158 Case with 60W PSU.
I'm reliably informed that you can disable the case fans in this
combination provided you're not silly about adding other high wattage
video capture cards etc. Expect the consumption to be about 20W.
Using a modern 2.5" laptop drive will also save power 4W vs a 3.5"
drives 11W typical figures.
For firewall duties I'm currently considering a WRAP 1E-2 board which
should consume under 7W but that's a very non-standard diskless system.
> Does anyone know if these machines will now cope with the likely loads
> of modern mail filtering (the present machine is a 560MHz AMD and is
> sometimes brought to its knees, but then it _is_ also running X and
> usually has a least firefox open).
X shouldn't be anywhere near a box that's running firewall or server
like dutys. However the usual solution to mail performance problems
is to add more RAM. Most spam filtering solutions seem to be memory
hungery.
I'd suggest any of the mini-ITX motherboards would cope fine provided
they have sufficient RAM installed.
--
Bob Dunlop
