A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.

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XMPP: prodigalfrog@slrpnk.net

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Older desktops can have a somewhat hefty idle power draw due to the overall system consumption contributing more than expected, such as the southbridge. According to this old review of the i7-2600k, the system idles at 74w, which at $0.12 per KWh, would cost you roughly $77 per year. Though you might want to confirm that with a Kill-a-watt meter if you can (libraries sometimes lend them out), since I’m pretty sure that total system power chart includes a discrete GPU, so the real number for a GPU-less system is probably around 40 or 50w at idle.

    If that is accurate, you could potentially replace your i7-2600 with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client from ebay for about $40 (in the US), and that idles at 5w, which would only cost you $5 a year at the same rate.

    Older thin clients and laptops tend to have much better idle power draws compared to desktops. For other people reading this, if you’re using a desktop for a low-power use case, it’s probably worth finding out what its idle power consumption is and doing the calculation to determine if it’d be worth replacing it with a more efficient used thin-client or office mini-pc.










  • I’d actually never used Photoshop until yesterday (CS6 to be exact. Yarr! 🏴‍☠️ ), out of curiosity to see how it compared to this modded GIMP, so I don’t really have a good frame of reference on how they truly compare beyond what I messed around with briefly.

    On a side note, I’ve seen on youtube that it’s possible to get the latest version of Photoshop working in WINE on Linux Mint, which could be an option if you decide to fully switch to Linux. I managed to get CS6 working in WINE, though it seemed to be a little slowish when making brush strokes (unsure if that was normal or not), and there was a couple minor visual bugs (a tooltip not going away), but nothing that would’ve fully prevented me from using it.