Buying SAM 460 to replace my PC

[Hans_]

How many watts does a typical Sam460 consume?

I happen to have my machines hooked up via a power meter, and the Sam460ex consumes approx. 18 Watts when sitting idle in Workbench, 21 Watts when compiling, and 24 Watts when it's running Composite3DDemo. This is with a Radeon HD 4650 graphics card.

Hans

[Hans_]

Curious, because you can configure some pretty low power PCs.  My i3-2100t HTPCs with 8GB RAM consume around 16w at idle, and bump up to the low 20s when playing back full bitrate BluRays ripped to MKVs.

I think that a fair bit of the power consumption in my case is the graphics card. The PPC460ex processor uses ~6.35W at 1 GHz with DDR2 RAM (according to the datasheet that I looked at), but the Radeon HD 4650 has a TDP of 48W (if you trust wikipedia).

The idle power consumption could probably be trimmed further if power-management was implemented in the RadeonHD driver. As things currently stand, the GPU and VRAM are always run at max clock-speeds and voltages.

EDIT: Likewise, idle power consumption could probably be reduced a bit if unused hardware such as the on-board graphics card could be powered down completely.

Hans

[Hans_]

@ Danwood:

Yeah, boot times have gotten longer, sadly.  I chalk it up to the new AmigaOS 4.1 bootup "splashscreen" that came in u3?,  I think.  It literally is prolonging the boot process time wise by like 75%+.

I highly doubt that the new splash-screen is the cause. AmigaOS 4.x has had a boot screen for ages, and changing the colour of the pixels won't suddenly slow it down. Have you added "run >NIL:" in front of the line that starts up networking? Maybe you used to have that, and forgot to reinsert it after an update. The complete line in my startup-sequence reads:

Run >NIL: NIL: Execute S:Network-Startup

Anyone know if this can be turned off?  It's a real pain in the ass, the machine sans splashscreen could have been cold booted 3 times with a SSD in the time you sit waiting on the splashscreen, if the splashscreen was optional.  I don't recall seeing any switch options or ways to disable it in the docs, but I could have very well missed something.

Like I said above, I doubt that disabling the splash screen will make a difference. Nevertheless, if you dislike it so much, commenting out "MODULE Kickstart/bootimage" in the kicklayout should get rid of it.

Hans

[Hans_]

Thanks Hans, I'll try to disable the boot image entirely with your MODULE Kickstart/bootimage advice.

Yeh, I am sure that's what the delay is - when it sits there for 7 seconds with just the splashscreen showing, I can't think of what else it would be.  Nothing else has changed, and the machine actually stays on the splashscreen longer than the entire boot process from cold to usable status ever did previously.  It got much worse with the latest update it seems.

The boot screen has absolutely no impact on the boot time once the screen shows. The only delay is the time taken to load the boot image, and open the screen.

Usually, when the boot screen sits there for several seconds, it's due to a router taking its time in delivering an IP address via DHCP. This is why I mentioned the startup-sequence change that allows booting to continue even though the network isn't up yet.

Hans