Very Low-Wattage Desktop Computers: Green, Cheap, and Silent

by Rhona Mahony. Small, inexpensive laptop computers from Asus, Acer, HP, Dell, and other companies have been selling well. Many people have found that the low price and portability of these Lilliputian machines outweigh the inconvenience of squinting at a seven-inch (18-cm) display and relearning to type on a child-sized keyboard. At least one famous tall person, Stephen Fry, whose hands are presumably large if not Brobdingnagian, has publicly announced his delight with his Asus EEE PC. Those of us with weak eyes and stubbornly unretrainable fingers, however, have been left out of the fun. Why don’t companies offer a tiny, $300, 20-watt, stand-alone computer into which one can plug a comfortable keyboard and the actually legible display of one’s choice? Such computers do exist. Like their tiny laptop cousins, they require honest assessment of one’s computing needs. In return, they offer several unexpected advantages over a conventional desktop PC.

Small and Smaller

Two inventions made the new, tiny laptop and desktop computers possible: the mini-ITX motherboard and low-power CPU’s. VIA Technologies of Taiwan introduced the mini-ITX motherboard in 2001 for industrial applications, such as running television set-top boxes and electronic kiosks. It was much smaller, at 170 mm by 170 mm (6.7 inches), than the most common personal-computer board, the ATX, which was and still is 305 by 244 mm (12 by 9.6 inches).
By design, the mini-ITX’s built-in chips used little electricity. Hobbyists loved mini-ITX’s and insisted on turning them into general-purpose personal computers, often stuffing them into unlikely cases, such as teddy bears and toasters. Retailers noticed. Now the mini-ITX board is an open industry standard and manufactured by many companies, such as Intel and Jetway.

PC builders typically install on a mini-ITX board a CPU by Intel, Advanced Micro Design (AMD), or VIA . Those CPU’s range widely in electricity consumption, performance, and price, depending on the target application and customer. The thriftiest new CPU’s use very much less than the 45 to 65 watts of traditional ones. The innovation here has been astounding. According to their manufacturers’ claims, Intel’s new 1.6 GHz Atom, for example, draws only 4 watts; AMD Geode LX 900 draws only 1.5 watts; and VIA’s new C7 draws “on average” less than 1 watt. The remarkable thing is not how little electricity these CPU’s sip, but how much fast, sophisticated computing they do with so little electricity.

Cool

A side benefit of the Atom and the other low-wattage CPU’s is that they do not radiate as much heat as traditional ones. Manufacturers can carefully design a heat sink, a lump of heat-conducting material that sits on top of the CPU and carries the unwanted, circuit-cooking heat away from it to the computer’s case, and thence to the surrounding air. Some mini-ITX desktop manufacturers even craft heat-radiating ridges or fins on the outside of their case to speed that conduction. Clever passive heat radiation can make it unnecessary to install a fan inside the case. Leaving out a fan reduces the overall electricity usage of the computer even further.

Quiet

Leaving out a fan has another advantage; the machine runs more quietly. For completely silent operation, companies leave out a spinning hard drive. Asus and the other “netbook” sellers offer versions of their laptops with a solid-state drive (SSD), a giant chunk of motionless “flash” memory, instead of a hard drive. So do the mini-ITX desktop makers. Solid-state drives, though, cost more than hard drives of the same capacity. For $100, it is easy now to buy a 500 GB hard disk drive. That $100 will get you only about 8GB of solid state storage. A noise-sensitive person who knows he needs only 8 GB, though, may be happy to trade away the whirring and chugging.

Show Me the Watts

A very low-consumption mini-ITX desktop with good general performance draws 8 watts when actively calculating (the Aleutia E2). A conventional desktop uses between 100 and 200 watts. For comparison, a typical American refrigerator uses about 500 watts when the electric motor is humming. A 100-watt, incandescent light bulb uses, yes, 100 watts.

Tiny is Cute and Sometimes Useful

The Aleutia E2 computer is 115 mm by 115 mm by 35 mm (in inches: 4.5 by 4.5 by 1.4). Logic Supply’s SolidLogic Little Falls GS-L05 computer is 190 mm by 76 mm by 184 mm (in inches: 7.4 by 3 by 7.2). They are small enough to screw onto the back of a display, and come with mounting brackets to do so. People short on space will find that they take up very little.

Prices

The mini-ITX desktop computers from the companies listed below range in price from $285 to over $1000, depending on the performance of their CPU, RAM, graphics chips, etc.

What Operating System?

The vendors of these computers offer Windows XP and Vista, but those operating systems require a large hard disk, more RAM, a fan, and thus more electricity than the thriftiest mini-ITX configurations. Microsoft also levies a roughly $100 license fee per computer for the Windows OS. A free, highly efficient operating system–such as Linux–takes full advantage of the smallest, cheapest, thriftiest, and silent mini-ITX machines (say, 256 MB of RAM and a 4GB solid-state disk). Linux has matured in ease of use, interoperability with Windows and Apple programs, power, and attractiveness. That’s why Asus, Acer, and HP are shipping so many laptop “netbooks” with Linux installed. Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu team has made a point of designing a version of Linux that is especially pretty and easy to use.

For Whom?

Trading in a big, hot desktop for a tiny, cool one will not cut the average person’s electric bill significantly. People who are short on space, or are delighted by clever, tiny gadgets, or who cherish silence, or are greening every appliance out of principle, or want a low-cost alternative, or can’t wait to connect a keyboard to their toaster should think mini-ITX.

Where to Buy

• Aleutia
• Cappuccino PC
• Itx Depot
• Logic Supply
• Logisys
• Polywell Computers
• Stealth Computer