On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 04:47:47PM +0000, Anthony Anson wrote:

On 10/01/13 16:19, Chris Green wrote:

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Why is it that no one seems to sell 'ordinary' PCs, in ordinary sized boxes, but with reasonably power efficient components.

If you don't feel competent to build one from scratch, go to a proper computer shop (where are you? I can recommend some in the Norwich area.) and they will put one together for you - probably cheaper than you could.

I've been building my PCs since quite a long time ago (like since they were 386 processors, and NextGen processors - remember them?). However nowadays it doesn't really make economic sense.

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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.

Not a tremendous challenge though.

It's not a challenge putting a Raspberry Pi in a box and adding some USB disks, no. However it won't be a particularly good server. The difficulty is finding out which motherboards are low power and then finding a suitably efficient power supply. My desktop machine (Intel I3, 8Gb memory, two 1Tb disks) consumes only about 40 watts because I chose a reasonably low power board (after much searching to find information) and an efficient power supply. It's still a *bit* of a bodge though because the power supply isn't designed to fit in a standard box. Since my system only uses 40 watts it needs a much smaller power supply than most full-sized PC ones. Even a very efficient 300 watt power supply isn't going to be particularly good at 40 watts. I'm using an 80 watt supply.

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I guess I'm after much the same as Laurie but with maybe more emphasis on power consumption. A basic case with low power mother board, low end processor, etc. and space for several disks.

Then you can run Tom's RTBT and have a low-end OS too?

This is where your competent small trader scores. Try Anglian Internet.

I'd be *really* surprised if they know power consumption figures for assembled PCs (before they assemble them that is, I can measure the consumption of something I've built). I will send them an enquiry though. -- Chris Green