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What Is A Crystal? And How To Test It
Crystal are use to keep the frequency of the clock from drifting. If the signal from this clock stops, or is weak, or the pulses begin to vary, the electronic equipments might show intermittent faults or might stop altogether. The microprocessor pins that hold the crystal are usually called OSC IN and OSC OUT as shown in Figure 1 and the frequency is marked on the crystal. Typical examples of crystal oscillator frequency are 3.58MHZ, 4MHZ, 8MHZ, 24MHZ etc. Testing Crystal (a) Using Oscilloscope (b) Frequency Counter (c) Crystal Checker Jestine Yong is a electronic repairer and writer. For more information about electronic repair please visit his website at http://www.noahtec.com
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Going at this rate we would reach a time soon whenthe energy required would be much higher than the energy available inthe market. Intel, AMD, Transmeta and Via have all released processors whichconsume very low power. A typical Pentium or AMD processor consumesabout 25 Watts of power, whereas these low powered processors take onlyabout 5 watts of power i.e. about 5 low powered processors wouldconsume as much power as a single main stream processor of today. Theselow powered processors are also generally fan less processors whichmeans lower noise levels too. Intel has the centrino which has a lowerpower consumption than the regular pentiums. Intel also has the armprocessors but those are RISC. Our prime focus would be AMD, Transmetaand Via. They all have some very promising products.One thing to be noted is that most of these low powered processors workonly at about 1.2GHz or lower. So they won't be as fast the pentium4s.Which means one would have to host lesser sites per server. 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