Power consumption of Music PC

[koushik]

Hi friends,

Recently I bought a Asus Xonar Essence STX sound card to build my music PC.
I also considered CD player but decided to buy STX as Music PC is more convenient for me as I listen to FLAC/Wav files more.

But while using is for long time, I am thinking about the power consumption now. When listening to music on a multi-purpose PC makes other unit, not so necessary for playing music, also get power and consume power. In one hand a CD player starts quickly and consume lesser (~25W) than PC which takes whole windows to load and consume considerable more amount of power.

Is there way to make PC consume lesser power and also starts quickly something like as we do, direct boot to XBMC for movies by-passing Windows..

Thanks.

 

[theironhorse]

direct boot will not be able to help in save power for the fact all the hardware components used by os will be used by xbmc too hence negligible power saving.

to start with keep single HDD in the pc . one cpu fan with passive air flow and not based on extra fans.besides that disconnect anything extra not usable.

nutin much can be done to drastically reduce the power on the currect setup.

for a new setup a less power rated cpu . basic mobo with pci-1x slot and a sound card should do the job with a 400w normal PSU.

on idle a music pc should be consuming around 60-70w alone for the CPU. lcd monitor seperate. it will gradually increase with load.

http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html. .check this for more on pc power usage.



eXtreme Power Supply Calculator

this is a good calculator to get the idea of what components are using power and unusable stuff can be avoided.

 

[baijuxavior]

What is your current PC configuration? I would suggest to use AMD E350 Fusion based PC. It will consume only around 25W and is a good HTPC platform that will play all your 1080p content.

 

[koushik]

Thanks @theironhorse
I will go through the link and get back.

What is your current PC configuration? I would suggest to use AMD E350 Fusion based PC. It will consume only around 25W and is a good HTPC platform that will play all your 1080p content.

My PC is bit old but enough for Music playing.
AMD Phenom X3 2.4GHz
Asus M2N Mx SE Plus
Asus Xonar Essence STX
2GB DDR2 800MHz RAM.

 

[koushik]

Hi Guys,
Is there any way to directly boot to Foobar or something like that by passing windows for music PC?

 

[manniraj]

Hi Guys,
Is there any way to directly boot to Foobar or something like that by passing windows for music PC?

I think so not sure, just try out the option making the Foobar load directly windows shell similar to xbmc loading. Look at baiju's or sam9s thread in htpc section.

thanks

 

[baijuxavior]

You can boot directly into any .exe file without loading explorer. Type 'regedit' in windows 7 start search box and open the registry editor. Expand to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon .Change the value of 'shell' which is 'explorer' by default to the path of your foobar.exe. If there is space between the path then enclose the path in "". You can also use a tool like instantsheller to change the shell.