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It sounds like something is wrong with how your hardware or OS is doing power management if you don't see a difference between idle and full load. Also, what el

by sciurus 11y ago

It sounds like something is wrong with how your hardware or OS is doing power management if you don't see a difference between idle and full load. Also, what else is in your system? 50 ways seems pretty high. For just the CPU, the most power-hungry Atom I can find has a TDP of 10 watts. http://ark.intel.com/m/products/59683/Intel-Atom-Processor-D2700-1M-Cache-2_13-GHz#@product/specifications http://ark.intel.com/m/products/59683/Intel-Atom-Processor-D...

driverdan 11y ago
Agreed. Something isn't right here. An Atom system should be drawing much less power at idle. I have an older low end AMD system I built with the intention of having it be low power. It draws around 40W at idle.
- devonkim 11y ago
  Depends upon the generation of Atom honestly. Older Atoms had extremely inefficient chipsets paired with them despite the processors having some varying power draw, but the CPU on those only took somewhere between some mW up to several watts which were eclipsed by the rest of the system typically (the chipsets drew at least 11 w idle or load last I remember). I had one of the older Ion 2 Atom 330 boxes that were popular for media center PCs and it didn't really matter if it was made by nVidia either - power draw was pretty much the same no matter what.
- esaym 11y ago
  The dual core atom from the 2010 era is a strange beast. True it idles at less than 4 watts, but the chipset they were paired with draw 15 watts or so. My estimates for my power usage are: Chipset/motherboard: 15 watts CPU: 6 watts 2 hard drives: 10 watts really old crap PSU from 2002: 20 watts Although I didn't measure each component by it self, all the power requirements and specs are posted online mostly. Except my really old PSU, I can only assume that is where the power is going. I probably should have bought a new PSU for the build, instead I bought $20 in adapters just to make the PSU work with the board :) But my killawatt meter clearly shows the box drawing 50-55 watts around the clock. And if you are nosy, this is what the dual core atom box runs: http://shorewall.net/XenMyWay.html http://shorewall.net/XenMyWay.html I got tired of having a separate web dev box and firewall box in my house. So I stood up Xen on a debian OS on the atom hardware, and now my firewall and web dev box are Xen guest. Make for fun Dom0 host upgrades when the internet is being provided by a guest that it is itself hosting...
esaym 11y ago
I was somewhat being facetious. The difference of idle and load on the Atom is just a handful of watts. Completely nil when compared to my (older) desktop which is about 120 at idle and if you do some number crunching on GPU and CPU, the draw is about 230.

by sciurus 11y ago

driverdan 11y ago

Agreed. Something isn't right here. An Atom system should be drawing much less power at idle. I have an older low end AMD system I built with the intention of having it be low power. It draws around 40W at idle.

devonkim 11y ago
Depends upon the generation of Atom honestly. Older Atoms had extremely inefficient chipsets paired with them despite the processors having some varying power draw, but the CPU on those only took somewhere between some mW up to several watts which were eclipsed by the rest of the system typically (the chipsets drew at least 11 w idle or load last I remember). I had one of the older Ion 2 Atom 330 boxes that were popular for media center PCs and it didn't really matter if it was made by nVidia either - power draw was pretty much the same no matter what.
esaym 11y ago
The dual core atom from the 2010 era is a strange beast. True it idles at less than 4 watts, but the chipset they were paired with draw 15 watts or so. My estimates for my power usage are: Chipset/motherboard: 15 watts CPU: 6 watts 2 hard drives: 10 watts really old crap PSU from 2002: 20 watts Although I didn't measure each component by it self, all the power requirements and specs are posted online mostly. Except my really old PSU, I can only assume that is where the power is going. I probably should have bought a new PSU for the build, instead I bought $20 in adapters just to make the PSU work with the board :) But my killawatt meter clearly shows the box drawing 50-55 watts around the clock. And if you are nosy, this is what the dual core atom box runs: http://shorewall.net/XenMyWay.html http://shorewall.net/XenMyWay.html I got tired of having a separate web dev box and firewall box in my house. So I stood up Xen on a debian OS on the atom hardware, and now my firewall and web dev box are Xen guest. Make for fun Dom0 host upgrades when the internet is being provided by a guest that it is itself hosting...

esaym 11y ago

I was somewhat being facetious. The difference of idle and load on the Atom is just a handful of watts. Completely nil when compared to my (older) desktop which is about 120 at idle and if you do some number crunching on GPU and CPU, the draw is about 230.