I imagine that if you got yourself one of those Via EPIA N boards at 533 MHz, with a flash module for a harddrive and a really slick power supply you might be able to pull this off. The board itself draws about 12 Watts, though I haven't been able to find out if that is at load or idle. You might even be able to use a laptop harddrive in there, as the newer low power ones will draw less than 5 watts peak. Even so, that doesn't include a monitor, and the computer you end up with is pretty impressively slow. The Via CPUs perform slower clock for clock than a Pentium II, so you're looking at maybe a 450MHZ PII with roughly zero video power, and probably not too much ram, since larger modules draw more power.
I suppose a rather stripped Linux distro could use that to surf the web and listen to music, but as soon as you needed to compile something (Proper support of all the hardware on that board would require a kernel compile, which would likely take about 8 hours) you'd be wishing you'd just shelled out for a 35 watt computer.
Well that was fun to think about, time to go back to working on the 3 machines that are putting out a combined 1KW of heat under my desk w/o aircon.
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I imagine that if you got yourself one of those Via EPIA N boards at 533 MHz, with a flash module for a harddrive and a really slick power supply you might be able to pull this off. The board itself draws about 12 Watts, though I haven't been able to find out if that is at load or idle. You might even be able to use a laptop harddrive in there, as the newer low power ones will draw less than 5 watts peak. Even so, that doesn't include a monitor, and the computer you end up with is pretty impressively slow. The Via CPUs perform slower clock for clock than a Pentium II, so you're looking at maybe a 450MHZ PII with roughly zero video power, and probably not too much ram, since larger modules draw more power.
I suppose a rather stripped Linux distro could use that to surf the web and listen to music, but as soon as you needed to compile something (Proper support of all the hardware on that board would require a kernel compile, which would likely take about 8 hours) you'd be wishing you'd just shelled out for a 35 watt computer.
Well that was fun to think about, time to go back to working on the 3 machines that are putting out a combined 1KW of heat under my desk w/o aircon.