Power consumption: Do any ITX boards come close to Thin Clients?

[tom2u]

I get tired of the noise and power consumption of my PC and was looking at a Thin Client to add so I can have the main PC off most of the time. The Thin Client would be for email, IM (text and audio), occasional faxing in and out, VOIP softphone, maybe audio player, home video surveillance and torrents (need to add a big hard drive for either of those). But maybe the Thin Client won't have the power to handle some of those types of programs, especially if I'm multitasking.

So maybe there's a (mini) ITX board that comes close to the Thin Client's power consumption? Any ideas? Right now its at about 60 watts idling with no monitor for a 1.8ghz Core2Duo e4300 stock clocked/2gb DDR2 machine. If I could get down to 20 watts that would be great. I'd run it mostly off a SSD so it would be almost completely silent but I'm good with fans so my fans are always inaudible (always use external air @ 5 volts!).

There is a real need for this: An always on tool that is instantly accessible, with low power consumption and no noise.

 

[noidea_77]

What about a cheap netbook? Low power consumption and way more versatile then any thin client. Basically an ITX or ATX board doesn't make any difference. The cpu / gpu and psu are the limiting factor.

 

[tom2u]

Yeah but this is for an always on computer. Wouldn't want to run a netbook 24/7. Also I don't like the idea of stuff being so packed in. Impossible to work on.

 

[rwpritchett]

Have you looked at the Intel NUC?

Interesting little setup. Idles at 6W and peaks at 28W (source) and is much more powerful than your current setup. You would have to use external storage, however.

 

[tom2u]

LOL...that is one AMAZING design! 4"x4" motherboard with up to 16gb of ram! 6w idle! Like a thin client except you can actually do something with it. What a perfect way of taking your work home with you and just plug it into your monitor. I wonder what the motherboards cost with the embedded CPU?