Stan Hoeppner wrote: > You could probably get away without connecting the 4 pin aux CPU power > on the Foxconn board if using a 65w or lower CPU. I've never tried it. > But I don't find anything in the manual that says the board won't post > with it disconnected. Many newer boards won't power up without it > connected and their docs say so in bold print. This is a safety feature > to keep folks with 80+ watt CPUs from burning up the board traces and/or > smoking the 24pin +12V wires due to excessive current draw. On the low power Atom D525 it won't POST with the 4-pin cpu power disconnected. I tried it. > Worse case scenario if it must be connected, you also buy a $15 PSU with > the 4 pin aux CPU +12V output. It's still a big win over spending $120 > to add memory to an old slow box. > > Now, if you plan to use it as a headless server, spend the $50 on the > memory and use it as is. Should be fine for some light duty stuff. Agreed. I reuse a lot of older hardware too. Here is another general observation. I routinely measure the total power of a system and label it for reference later. I have been moving out some of the older power hungry machines and replacing them with newer greener lower power systems. Like the Atom which can make a nice low watt system very easily and has reasonable performance for many tasks. But that doesn't mean that all old hardware is high power. I am still using a Pentium 166MHz machine in a dedicated role because at 33 watts it is still doing the job I need it to do and it is lower power than most newer machines. I can beat 33 watts today (but at a significant cost) and will probably change it out soon but for example a new Foxconn machine I built up recently was 65 watts. Simply replacing old with new isn't always lower power. It must be measured to be sure. A previous generation core 2 duo of mine runs 150 watts. Machines in the high wattage envelope are pretty common. I still use that power hungry machine but I turn it off between uses. I also have an IBM workstation that burns 250 watts. That one is off most of the time. My main desktop for program development and email I have converted to a 40 watt low power Core 2 Quad system. For systems that I have running 24x7 I am now optimizing for a combination of total power and reasonable performance. Not peak gaming machine performance. Peak performance can pull a lot of power. The GPU is the newest single power hog in high performance systems. So for me I now have dedicated machines. Some run 24x7 and I try to make them as low of power as possible. Others that need peak performance and are going to draw high power I turn on for when I want to use them, use them, and then I turn them off when I am not using them. The idea of having one desktop that does it all is no longer viable for me. I try to optimize each machine for its task. Bob
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