[This item was updated on Monday, July 30, to reflect a problem with the measurements. Measurements are now correct for the Duron power consumption (91W) ]
Well this is curious. I’ve got the Zonbu desktop running on one of the old test machines I have laying around. I put 512Mb of RAM in it and it has a 1.1Ghz processor, only mildly slower than the 1.2 GHz in the actual Zonbu box.
I am running from a 40GB hard disk and there is an optical drive in the machine, as well as a dedicated video card and an extra expansion card I’m not using at the moment. I mention all this because I’ve got my Kill-a-watt connected to measure the power consumption. With all that hardware, I’m only using a steady 91W while I surf the web and write this. I’ve got Skype running as well. [I’m going to pull the expansion card later and re-test to see if we save anything.]
So while is not the 15W the Zonbu claims, its surprisingly little power draw given all the equipment. If I ran from flash, used on-board video and took out the expansion and video cards, I have a feeling I could shave another 5-8W off my total. Whereas my “regular” desktop PC was sucking back 140-160w performing similar tasks.
It’s all got me thinking, are we using “SUV-like” PC’s? Sucking huge amounts of power all day long when 80% of the time we hardly need any at all to accomplish our normal tasks? It sure does look that way…
Desktop performance is very smooth.
I continue to be impressed. I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on the actual hardware.
-Mr. Zonbu
Real life with the Zonbu Mini-PC 
I’m glad I found your blog. I’m gravitating towards the same line of thinking. Do we really need SUV PCs just to run office productivity apps and surf the Net? So I’ve been looking to revamp my IT strategy and give the admin/sales staff refurbished Celeron PCs running Linux and OpenOffice, and getting an Eee notebook to replace my Apple Powerbook.
And instead of getting a gigantic Mac Pro as a much-needed workstation, I’m going to supplement our existing design Power Macs with a Mac Book Pro instead. Hooked up to external monitor, keyboard, mouse and Firewire 800 hard disk, I’m pretty confident it will suck up much less power than a Mac Pro would.