Low power office computer?

[vskid3]

The i5 4570T in my M93p scored 299 single core and 695 multi in Cinebench R20, if you want to add that to your chart.

You could use a USB enclosure for your 3.5" drive. For my M93p, I have a 2.5" SSD inside for the boot drive and a USB 3 hard drive for storage.

[Daox]

Thanks for that vskid! I would have guessed it would have done better than the 200GE and 3000G. But, I could not find those numbers anywhere.

[Daox]

Do you know what other CPUs can be put into the M93P?

[vskid3]

Originally Posted by Daox

Do you know what other CPUs can be put into the M93P?

It looks like the only other CPU it came with was the i7-4765T, not sure if anything else would be supported.

Is your ultimate goal the lowest possible energy usage or saving money upfront and long term? I recently got an HP Z220 SFF that I have an i5-3550 and GTX 1050 Ti in. It idles and even plays Youtube at 25-30w with spikes to 40-60w when doing tasks like opening programs or loading webpages (highest I've seen is about 100w in games, I wouldn't be surprised if it could hit 130w). So most office computers from the last ~5 years should get you better performance and power usage. Your monitor(s) might become the bigger energy user at that point.

[Daox]

My goal is to find a slightly faster computer that has drastically lower power consumption. Money input into this would ideally be minimal after selling the old equipment. Saving money in power usage really isn't a big deal. She doesn't use it a massive amount and she is good about turning it off. Another part is that it is a fun project for me because I like tinkering and finding out what else is out there. Before looking into this I didn't even know celerons were still a thing, and I didn't know about the micro / mini PCs. I'd love to try a Pi4, but I really don't think that would fit her well. But, it was great to find out that you can actually do it.

I did get a message from Redpoint on EcoModder. He is going to ship me his old i5-3570k setup. We'll see what I can do with it to get its idle power draw down. I think he said it idles around 35W. With a K series CPU I know you can overclock them, so perhaps I can undervolt this one? I'm not sure if its an OE brand or what. I suppose I could still use Intel XTU to tweak that though. So, once I get it I'll still do some tweaking to lower its power consumption a bit more.

[u3b3rg33k]

Originally Posted by Daox

My goal is to find a slightly faster computer that has drastically lower power consumption. Money input into this would ideally be minimal after selling the old equipment. Saving money in power usage really isn't a big deal. She doesn't use it a massive amount and she is good about turning it off. Another part is that it is a fun project for me because I like tinkering and finding out what else is out there. Before looking into this I didn't even know celerons were still a thing, and I didn't know about the micro / mini PCs. I'd love to try a Pi4, but I really don't think that would fit her well. But, it was great to find out that you can actually do it.

I did get a message from Redpoint on EcoModder. He is going to ship me his old i5-3570k setup. We'll see what I can do with it to get its idle power draw down. I think he said it idles around 35W. With a K series CPU I know you can overclock them, so perhaps I can undervolt this one? I'm not sure if its an OE brand or what. I suppose I could still use Intel XTU to tweak that though. So, once I get it I'll still do some tweaking to lower its power consumption a bit more.

if you don't need a big GPU, the NUC has a 25W power brick. full load under that idle. depends on what you want.

[Daox]

I got the computer with the i5-3570K from Redpoint5 just the other day. Big thanks to Redpoint for the generosity! It arrived mostly intact, with only a little bit of shipping roughage, but nothing that can't be quickly solved. The system will need a quick cleaning up (dust), but looks to be put together with nice quality products for the most part. That was a very pleasant surprise. This is much better IMO than a HP or Dell. After I get that taken care of we'll measure the power draw and see what we can do lower that power consumption.

[jeff5may]

I just went a couple of rounds with a mobo/processor/memory rig like that. I believe it was the same processor, maybe not the k version. Intel desktop board with a skull on it. The eyes light up to indicate hard drive activity.

I needed to get windows 10 on my htpc, since the streaming service providers only send surround sound audio if you are using their windows 10 app. I figured hey, why not upgrade the whole thing?

Once I swapped motherboards, the Intel board refused to boot anything. I tried a gaggle of methods. System would post, bios working great, then it would hang at error code 00. Screen showed a 0 and that's all folks.

I finally figured out that all the graphics cards I have are too new. Board has no onboard video, so until I find a 12 year old video card, I'm stuck. I put the old motherboard back in the case and loaded up a fresh windows 10 on it.

[Daox]

I've been playing with the new to me computer setup and am quite happy with it. Performance is definitely superior and power consumption is light years ahead of the older computer despite only being 2 years newer technology (2010 vs 2012).

After some tweaking, I was able to get idle power consumption down to about 28W. All the readings were taken via a killawatt from the wall, so it is total system power draw. Here is the process I went through:

stock idle - 33W
unplug DVD drive - 31W
swap out bronze 500W to 350W gold rated power supply - 29W
add wifi card - 29W
add HDD - 29-30W

I then started to undervolt the processor. It did quite a great job and is pretty stable at -.18V though I think I may need to increase that to -.17V. My wife mentioned it crashed once on her today. But, all these settings were tested with a cinebench run.
-.03V - 29W
-.05V - 29W
-.10V - 29W
-.15V - 28W
-.18V - 28W
-.20V - crash

While poking around in the bios for undervolting, I also increased the sleep state from S1 to S3 and went from 26W sleeping down to 2W when sleeping.

Finally, I did also monitor power usage while benchmarking in cinebench. At stock it was using about 82W. After the undervolting it dropped it down quite a bit to 70W with the same performance. I did not underclock it, but its possible I could get power consumption down even further. Of course this would sacrifice performance.

I am very happy with these results. The old computer idled around 100W and the new one now runs about 28W at idle. So, the new computer uses less power at full load than the old one did while idling! Also, if my wife leaves the computer on by accident (which is rare), its not guzzling power all night long.

I also did take a months worth of power usage and it really isn't a ton. In the past 30ish days her old computer used about 9 kWh. I'll probably throw the killawatt on it and check the new one in a month.