On 10/01/13 16:19, Chris Green wrote:
Why is it that no one seems to sell 'ordinary' PCs, in ordinary sized boxes, but with reasonably power efficient components.
It's next to impossible to even find out what the power consumption is of most desktop PCs and very few of them have efficient power supplies (often the worst offender).
It's all very well advocating little Intel Atom based boxes but they almost never have any space for extra disk drives. The same applies to Raspberry Pi etc., very low power but no easy way to assemble in a box with a couple of disk drives.
I am sure the likes of http://linitx.com sell small NAS enclosures for the Mini-ITX format boards.
They also sell reasonably efficient PSU's ISTR, they will even assemble for you I believe.
I've used them before..always been pretty helpful and local (to me)
Not all of the larger Power Supplies are inefficient at low loads. SMPSU's make it fairly easy to be efficient at a wide range of loads. In fact to achieve 80 Plus certification at even the lowest level I think you need to be 80% efficient at 20% load...read up on it though as there are different levels of certification.
Oh and don't *always* trust those cheap energy meters when looking at a SMPSU because even with PFC they can represent an "interesting" load and sometimes confuse such devices.