What sort of power consumption diiference between...

A Fusion board, such as: Asus E45M1-M PRO

and a board/chip combo such as: Asrock A75M + AMD LLano 3500.

Looking at an "always on" media server box. If there's a huge difference in power consumption I'd probably go for the Fusion board and something like OpenELEC; otherwise it'll be full-blown Windows.

The Fusion one should be more than powerful enough, I run a little media centre box now a media server/download box on a little dual core atom with the ION chipset and it handles the duties fine, it was a little sluggish on some full W7 media center tasks but the AMD one is way more powerful. You'd probably do better with Windows on a lower power box though as the drivers are many times better and so the GPU can be used much more effectivly for media playback making the whole thing a lot more power efficient and quieter depending on the cooling. The ION stuff flys under Windows for stuff like full HD but chokes under linux as it falls back to the limited and power hungry cpu as it does not have the drivers for it.

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Originally Posted by SYNACK

You'd probably do better with Windows on a lower power box though as the drivers are many times better and so the GPU can be used much more effectivly for media playback making the whole thing a lot more power efficient and quieter depending on the cooling. The ION stuff flys under Windows for stuff like full HD but chokes under linux as it falls back to the limited and power hungry cpu as it does not have the drivers for it.

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Good point! Though OpenELEC claims to have a Fusion-optimized build. Might try it for a week or two and see how it goes (not like it's going to cost anything apart from a few hours).