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>I thought the accompanying chipset pushed the baby Atoms up to ~12w total.

This is one of Intel's own motherboards; let me dig it up...D945GCLF.

And I was wrong. The Atom itself has a TDP of 4W. The motherboard claims its total draw is 75W, with hard drive, optical, "and all board peripherals enabled". In practice, I kept it down a lot by installing (a) a laptop hard drive and (b) nothing else. I have a USB optical drive I hook up when I need it.

I should plug it into my Kill-A-Watt tonight and report back--I know I measured it before, but I didn't write down the numbers. I know the idle draw was stupidly low, like under a watt. (That's cheating a little, though, since it means unplugging the dongle for the wireless mouse&keyboard. Even when it's plugged in, it's on a USB hub, which I wasn't measuring.)



Thank you for following up. Much of that will be the rotary drive and unfair to compare to an SSD.

For what it is worth, I do like Intel, my Core 2 Duo is so good it will tide me over until Ivy Bridge (22nm).




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