Zonbu power consumption; a closer look

I’ve had my Zonbu for a few days now and I wanted to revisit the topic of energy use.

This morning when I got up I reset my Kill-a-watt and went about using the PC.

Five hours have passed since then, and aside from a 45 minute break I spent enjoying my day off at the pool, the machine has been in regular use as my desktop…

How much power did the Zonbu consume?

I confirmed that I had rolled exactly 5h 0m on the Kill-a-watt time counter, and I looked at the total KWH used. As you might have guessed, since the box runs ~10W, it used a paltry 0.05 KWH of power over the last five wall-clock hours.

That is impressive.

Not only has it used virtually no electricity, but it has been blissfully silent.

It is warm to the touch (not surprisingly, given the box is one big heat sink), but not uncomfortably hot.

Please include lm-sensors

If the lm-sensors package is installed so that environmental variables can be read, then I can’t find it.

I hope the Zonbu team add it so we can more closely monitor the fan speeds, system temperatures and so on.

I use it on some other VIA C7 boards that I have in my data center and it comes in handy.

Conclusion

I’d like to write a big long post about how nice and efficient and green the box is, but I think we’ve covered all the key poitns.

The box is small, it is silent, and it often uses even less than the 15W rating they talk about on their website. What a pleasant discovery.

I’ll let you return to the other, more scintillating topics on this blog.

-Mr. Zonbu

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