Migrating to a less power hungry HTPC.

E

EvilAngel

Gawd
Joined
Jan 9, 2002
Messages
597
I recently measured the power consumption of my HTPC/Fileserver with a Kill-a-watt and the reading was a beefy 340watts while running XBMC.

Admittedly even before the measurement i knew it wasn't very power efficient because i reused mostly the older parts i had from my previous gaming setup, but the consumption is just driving my power bill thru the roof since is on almost 24/7.

The hardware i'm currently using:

- Intel Q6600
- MSI P35 Platinum
- 4GB Ram
- ATI Radeon HD 5450
- 1 Old IDE 40gb HD for windows and programs
- 3 1TB WD Green drives

I'm using it for:

- XBMC
- Couchpotato
- Sickbeard
- Sabnzbd
- Web browsing
- A few emulators

And output using HDMI to a single 1080p TV

I currently have a P8H67-M EVO mb and 8GB of compatible ram that i am not using and would be nice if i could save a bit of money by using that.

Also i don't want to spend so much that i end up offsetting whatever i might save in a year or two in electricity.

What would you recommend?
 
Look into a AMD Trinity APU

or if you live near a micro center they practically give away a ivy bridge processor & mobo
 
Current HTPC:

Celeron G530
H67 (ITX) motherboard du jour
8gb RAM
2.5" 7200rpm HDD
PicoPSU
integrated graphics
Silverstone low-profile HSF

~30w idle / ~70w peak (prime95 + rthdribl)

Bump to IVB i3, newer motherboard, and SSD if you want a significant hardware upgrade at roughly the same power envelope.
 
EvilAngel said:
Intel Q6600 <-- This is your biggest culprit. This generation of CPU was not efficient. Furthermore, newer intel CPU have onboard GPU's which are more than sufficient for your application list
- MSI P35 Platinum <-- get the motherboard with the least amount of features that still meets your needs
- 4GB Ram
- ATI Radeon HD 5450 <-- waste of power for your application
- 1 Old IDE 40gb HD for windows and programs <-- go solid state
- 3 1TB WD Green drives <-- go down to 1 and allow sleep
Click to expand...

Go look at the Anandtech review on the "newer" ITX board they reviewed. While they sucked at the review (this guy wouldn't know an HTPC from a hole in the wall) the power consumption of this style system should be apparent.
 
Grab a G850 (pentium) for $70 (or the G860) and use your Asus mobo and ram and your done.

It's way more then fast enough, and sip's the power lightly.

the onboard gpu is plenty fast enough for all xbmc needs (I know, I use it).

Another thing, grab an SSD as they are totally worth it in an HTPC (heat, noise, and speed)
 
Thank you all for the replies!

I just got home from work and inspected the bios for the first time in a really long time, i still had it Overclocked to 3.6ghz... Stupid.

Removed the overclock and set the multiplier to 6 and now is running all the time at 1.6ghz, sadly my board doesn't have any option to undervolt the CPU and doesnt go lower than default voltage.

With that change alone the kill-a-watt is showing 100w idle and ~130w under load.

I'm going to wait a couple of weeks and see how Intel's NUC works out and if it doesnt i'll try to grab an Ivy Bridge i3 CPU to use with the P8H67-M EVO and also get a small SSD for the OS and maybe upgrade my storage to 2 x 2TB Caviar Green's instead of 3x1TB.

I assume that just with the CPU change and using the integrated video instead of the HD5450 the consumption will be much better.

Thanks again!
 
I dumped my Core2 and jumped on one of those $74 i3-2100s from a few weeks back.

One benefit of this more powerful setup is I can stream any channel to my laptop remotely using software. (capture screen at 30 FPS with SCFHDSF, Mux audio and screen cap in Adobe live encoder which also real-time encodes it to x264, output the stream to Adobe Streaming Media server hosted on the HTPC, connect to the stream anywhere using JWPlayer, use VNC to swap channels). I stream at 480p and 1.5 mbit, (~50-70% processor usage), so it's not perfect, but still looks pretty decent. Packet drops/and the ups and downs of home broadband isn't an issue because RTMP protocol has some buffering built in.

Simple, and I can watch my TV literally anywhere I have an Internet connection. If you want slingbox like functionality, it will likely be worth it to spend an extra few bucks on a faster processor.
 
Just as a follow up because I got my new HTPC up and running.

Went with a i3 3220, P8H67-M Evo, 120GB SSD (OS), 2x 3TB Seagate Barracuda (Media), Antec Green 80+ 350w PSU and a 120GB 2.5" Laptop drive to use as a temp download drive to only have the raid array going to copy the completed downloads (because you know... i download a lot of linux distros from usenet).

I'm very impressed by both the new speed and the ~35w idle power usage.

Word of advice to people like me that think of recycling an old gaming PC as an HTPC... watch the power usage, don't forget about your overclocks, under-volt/clock if possible or just sell the parts and build a power efficient HTPC.
 
EvilAngel said:
Just as a follow up because I got my new HTPC up and running.

Went with a i3 3220, P8H67-M Evo, 120GB SSD (OS), 2x 3TB Seagate Barracuda (Media), Antec Green 80+ 350w PSU and a 120GB 2.5" Laptop drive to use as a temp download drive to only have the raid array going to copy the completed downloads (because you know... i download a lot of linux distros from usenet).

I'm very impressed by both the new speed and the ~35w idle power usage.

Word of advice to people like me that think of recycling an old gaming PC as an HTPC... watch the power usage, don't forget about your overclocks, under-volt/clock if possible or just sell the parts and build a power efficient HTPC.
Click to expand...

I've played this game before, don't get your hopes up that it's going to dramatically lower your electric bill. Using my electric bill, I did the math to figure out that for every 100w of electricity I use non-stop for the entire year, amounts to less than $20. Going from 300+ to 35W should save you maybe $5 a month or so, which isn't anything to complain about, unless you're expecting the electric savings to offset the cost of equipment upgrades...
 
Ohh no, the biggest problem is that im not in the USA.

I get charged incrementally more money per watt the more watts i use (first 100kw/h a month cost X, next 100kw/h cost Y, etc) and even the lowest tier is almost double what you probably pay in USA, after 400kw/h or so is about $0.28 usd per watt/h, and it keeps getting nastier.

Last month alone i decreased my bill by the equivalent of $50USD by removing the old overclock and undervolting the Q6600 i had (went from ~300w or more to ~120w).

Now im going from 120 to ~35w not as noticeable but it will pay for itself eventually :p
 
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