In the meantime, I found out a rather stunning revelation about Athlon systems. There appears to be a latent "power save" mode built into all of them (not just the mobile models) that works perfectly and without any performance hit that I can detect. Something to do with sending a special instruction during the idle cycle. It is disabled by default. I have no idea why. You can enable it with a utility like FVCool. Using sensors, I watched the CPU temp drop 14C when idling... it's really something. Maybe it will work for you too.
On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, colliepon wrote:
Just curious both what other people are doing, and feature discussion (not b*tching :) on other methods of reducing the power use of a myth box since it can build up over awhile. (and my next move may very well be off grid - satellite TV, running off solar or wind, so power use is critical but i'd prefer an alternative to the VCR) A few examples i'm thinking of:
Could you schedule an expected time-on and time off to work with a normal block of programming? By shut down time I mean to properly suspend all tasks like commercial flagging without screwing up data or not doing them during the week at all. This would let you use a standard analog or digital wall timer to turn on the computer and satellite receiver for a given block of time (for instance 6:30pm to 10pm if you mostly like the evening block, or 11pm to about 3am if you like Adult Swim) since I don't know any other way to tell a computer to turn on at a given time. :) (though if someone knows of a computer-programmable wakeup solution please tell me!)
Or perhaps having a C3 machine with a PVR500 for 24hr recording which can wake up a P4 with another card for overflow during peak hours, and also to do things like commercial flagging or recompression. (which also might need to schedule file moves, for instance a 120gig drive on the C3 and 500gig on the P4 as primary storage)
Or maybe speed throttling certain cpu's might work - some of the new Centrino motherboards for desktop use http://www17.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20041224/index.html, laptops with a USB grabber, or even the underclocked Athlon XP http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041001/index.html - does anyone use anything like this? (or have any experience/insights worth sharing?) I've no clue how/if throttling is supported in linux, or mythTV or anything else, but it would be nice to let the cpu idle during daily recording and to speed up for flagging and transcoding.
Is anyone else using a lower power design or strategy with Myth?
Colliepon
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