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Less hungry machinesLess hungry machinesPosted Dec 20, 2008 23:03 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)Parent article: Profiling the Power Usage of a Desktop PC I have gone to an extreme position: a decTOP for server (9 W idle) and an Asus Eee 700 for desktop. That is right, the one with 2 GB solid state (disk?) drive and a 570 MHz CPU; it is not even the revised 701 with the 630 MHz chip which can be overclocked. And still it works like a charm for normal tasks like web browsing or document writing in Lyx. For CPU-hungry tasks... well, I don't do those any more. With an external monitor, keyboard and mouse the Eee is the perfect desktop machine: small, efficient and silent. The decTOP came into service when my NSLU2 died an ignominious death. The downside as a server is the Ethernet<->USB adapter, which is slow and unreliable. Moving big files to and fro is a pain, but you get patient. Overall my power consumption has gone down maybe 70%, and that wasn't even my main objective; I just wanted to do away with noisy machines. And it has worked; now I know that LCD monitors do make noise. Next time I might try an Eee Box, although I really like the solid state drive.
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Less hungry machines Posted Dec 21, 2008 2:22 UTC (Sun) by deleteme (guest, #49633) [Link]
But EEE700 has a very noisy fan,
Less hungry machines Posted Dec 21, 2008 10:20 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] The default fan setting of 40% is not so loud, but is certainly quite annoying. Luckily the Eee has a huge and loyal fanbase that has tried every crazy mod, and Debian pages are about the best. So I tried removing the little fan altogether: the temperature rose about 10 C to 70 C and after a couple of hours the SD card started to malfunction.With the Debian repository come the improved ACPI modules that give complete control over the fan. With a speed of 30% the fan is barely audible and yet temperatures rarely rise above 60 C. These three lines at startup do the trick: modprobe eee echo 1 > /proc/eee/fan_manual echo 30 > /proc/eee/fan_speed
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