Dear Community! I've been struggling to find a solution for building a low-energy consumption system for my work. Now I have a Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz, 1G RAM configuration that consumes around 160 Watts (measured by a Voltcraft power-consumption meter). I think there are many configurations that with same features that consume around 30W like Asrock ION 330HT-BD that has Intel Atom 300 (1.6GHz, Dual Core) and consumes 23 Watts according to a TechSpot review. A pre-built nettop with multimedia features (like the one above) is satisfactory, but not the only option. I would put my new PC together from different parts if necessary, the only thing I don't know, where to start and what kinds of parts are in the market I should take into consideration. My needs are the following * Has drivers for Windows XP (32-bit) * CPU: Intel Atom (Dual Core or any other CPU that consumes 2-8 Watts and has >=2GHz clock allover, like Z550) * Memory at least 1024MB * Passive cooling or very low noise if possible * DVD burner (no problem if supports blu-ray as well) * USB port, at least 4 * ESata, at least 2 (or 1 if 2nd SATA HDD can be mounted inside) * FireWire (IEEE 1394) * LAN supporting at least 100Mbit/s speed (full duplex) * VGA connector (D-sub 15) * IR-port (infrared) * Parallel port (not so important if I can replace it with an USB->Parport converter) * Serial port (RS232) If not pre-built * At least one PCI slot (PCI 2.0 backward compatible - no timing problems at older devices) I would like to use this configuration for the same purposes I use mine now: high-quality music authoring and recording, video editing and compositing (with hardware acceleration), web surfing, programming (developing applications), writing articles in office apps, watching movies, listening to music. Thanks for your help stringZ
An ATOM is fairly slow in terms of RAM CPU power. I have an ATOM 330 box in my bedroom, the results of the build I did here. It's too slow to even decode some 480p videos in CPU without dropping frames; I can only imagine how bad it would be for things like video editing. If not for NVidia's VDPAU accelerating video in Linux, it wouldn't even be usable as a settop box. In fact, my ATOM 330 takes overnight to transcode a couple of DVD-quality videos to h.264. You might consider looking at mobile versions of commodity CPUs instead of the ATOM, since you are intending on doing some very CPU-intensive activity. It would be a bit higher wattage, but I think you'd be happier with the results.
