Summary
I previously had a loud and relatively obnoxious Core i7 tower acting as my media center. I had a relatively powerful graphics card in it, since I was convinced I would eventually play StarCraft II on it, and I wanted the awesomez framerates. As discussions swirl around the power consumption of set-top boxes and how much power they're always sucking, I got fed up and built a lower powered system for my TV.
I'm quite amazed by what the latest Intel Sandy Bridge platform can do. My HTPC is virtually silent now, and I can watch all my HD content with CPU to spare. Atom systems might still have a price advantage, but I can now get truly powerful yet low powered systems for <$400. I settled for an ASUS P8H67-I Deluxe with an Intel Core i3-2100T CPU.
Details
I have 3 desktop systems in the house that I can easily measure the power consumption on using my P4400.
- Tyan Tempest I5000VS S5372-LC EATX with Intel Xeon E5310, 2x4GB DDR2 FB-DIMMs, two storage adapters (3ware 9550SXU and 3ware 9650SE) and attached disks
- CPU Benchmark: 2055 pts
- Power on, POST: 230-380w
- OS Boot: 250-265w
- Idle: 265w
- Storage adapters + disks pull around 55-60w (Samsung F4 2TB)
- Supermicro 5036T-TB with X8SAX, Intel Core i7-930, 3x2GB DDR3, 1x74GB WD Raptor, 2xoptical drives (Plextor PX-716, Pioneer BDR-203), ATI HD5770 1GB
- CPU Benchmark: 5836 pts
- Power on, POST: 180-215w
- Boot: 150w
- Win7 Media Center watching SD XviD over gbE: 130w
- Win7 Media Center watching HD 720p x264 over gbE: 120w (yay hardware acceleration saves me 10w!)
- ASUS P8H67-I Deluxe with Intel Core i3 2100T in Silverstone SG06B chassis (terrible!), 2x4GB DDR3 SODIMMs, Samsung 64GB 1.8" SSD, Lite-On slimline DVDRW, Intel 6200 WLAN mini-PCIe
- CPU Benchmark: 3320 pts
- Power on, POST: 36-48w
- Boot: 35-45w
- Win7 Media Center startup: 50w
- Win7 Media Center idle: 30w
- Win7 Media Center watching SD XviD over 802.11n: 31w
- Win7 Media Center watching HD 720p x264 over 802.11n: 34w
Okay. Let me just re-emphasize these numbers here. A $120 CPU today gives you plenty of power for only 35 watts of power - faster than an Intel Xeon CPU from 2008. This is a system that boots from cold in about 6 seconds, pushes 1080p video over HDMI, DVI or D-SUB VGA, and has enough CPU power to beat an Intel Core 2 E8400 from 2 years ago. But most importantly, Intel's latest platform enables much more powerful systems with extremely low power requirements. There's no longer a sacrifice in performance to hit 35w. Even if the video decode weren't hardware accelerated, the Core i3 has more than enough power to do the job. Amazing.
Most consumer machines aren't CPU bound anymore; even a $120 CPU like the Core i3 2100 is probably more than sufficient for every day tasks. Spend your money on a nice SSD, and load it with 8GB of RAM and you'll have a quiet, power-sipping system that gets the job done. Less heat, less need for a fan, probably more reliable.