I've already published an article or two about this device, but I've recently gotten a kill-a-watt and used it to measure the power usage on my Silent MythTV Frontend.
A Kill-a-Watt is a device that measures power usage at an outlet. I'll be measuring a few things with it that I'll probably be posting about over the next few months.
Anyway, my Silent MythTV Frontend only uses 20-21 watts while playing video. At idle, we're at 16 watts. I quite pleased. Addinally, what I was using before averages about 80 watts.
I know you're probably smart enough to do the math, but that's about 75%-80% power savings. 60-64 watts may not sound like much, but would you leave a 60 watt light bulb running 24 hours a day if you didn't have to?
Based on an online power calculator I found, that equates to about $4.37 per month in power bill savings, or about $50 per year.
This probably isn't the best way to rationalize building a system like this, but the power savings would pay for the cost of the system in about 6 years.
In addition to the power savings, the real reason I built it is that it's 100% silent. For a place where PC noise isn't welcome, like a bedroom, it's a perfect solution.
The silence is golden, and the energy saving are a nice plus I didn't count on.
My next project is to try out building a MythTV backend on the same Via EPIA platform. It won't be silent, but I'm curious what type of power savings I can achieve.
Did you try to play any HD
Did you try to play any HD recordings on your frontend ?
If so how does it handle it, any stutter ?
I had a XBOX with XBMC to watch my recordings but it doesn't have enough horsepower to decode HD smoothly...
No HD
I don't have an HDTV (yet), but I have seen forum and mailing list postings that seem to indicate that this motherboard can't handle HDTV.
For now since I don't have HDTV, it's not a big deal for me.