Boot times

Windows 7 SP1, XBMC, Splash and monitoring software installed. Lastly, I swapped Kingston V100 SSD for the previous generation V series (Kigston SSDnow 40GB, seq. read 170MB/s, seq. write 40MB/s).

Cold boot 27 sec incl. POST which takes about 2 seconds (!)
Waking up from sleep mode I can’t get sleep mode to work. Any suggestions?
Waking up from hibernation 24 sec
Shutdown 12 sec

The same build with 400GB HDD (Samsung HM400LI) for system instead of Kingston SSD starts up under 46 seconds – that’s cool for office work on low-cost PC’s, but I don’t recommend HDD for HTPC use as it ruins the quietness of the PC.

Temperatures

Disassembling a heatsink was the first thing I have done. I found out that embedded 6cm fan is very inefficient – it has too small impact on temperatures…and I don’t rate the noise of the fan. When no fan mounted the temperatures are great, it’s close to possibility of complete passive cooling. But it’s still not perfect, the stock heatsink needs to be replaced for bigger one first. The system is stable even on extreme 99°C, but as you can see in AMD E-350’s datasheet, the maximum temperature is 85°C, so I attached a silent 800RPM Scythe KAZE-JYUNI Slim SL fan and lowered RPM’s to ~500.
All the values are measured with case cover installed. Btw, the temperatures are changing very quickly according to current APU load, increasing temp of 5 degrees in a few seconds is very common.

fan speed task GPU+CPU chipset
fanless idle 60°C 41°C
fanless 40Mbit 1080p playback (Splash) 86°C 49°C
fanless 100% CPU load 99°C 56°C
477RPM idle 46°C 31°C
490RPM 40Mbit 1080p playback (XBMC) 55°C 36°C
490RPM 40Mbit 1080p playback (Splash) 58°C 34°C
570RPM 100% CPU load 67°C 36°C
SSD stays totally cool all the time

I wonder if it would be better to fix the fan speed, the results could be more accurate, but my setting reflects real conditions better.

Power consumption

Running win7, idle 16 Watts
XBMC main screen 20 Watts
XBMC screensaver 17 Watts
40Mbit 1080p playback, GPU acceleration enabled 21 Watts
100% CPU load 26 Watt
Sleep mode ??

Mods & other thoughts

  • Great EFI with legacy BIOS-like UI
    PWM adjustment, target temperature
  • POST screen take only 2 seconds (vs. 15sec on my desktop)
  • You can turn off LED blinking when PC is in sleep mode! The other option is „dual LED“. As my Akasa case doesn’t include dual polarity LED diode, I tweaked it and added red LED close to the present blue one. Now my HTPC shines red when in sleep, and blue when on.

UPDATE: I built a completely new htpc on a competitive platform, Intel Atom + nVidia ION2, but have no time to install an OS and review it these days :(