Low power hardware

[Chris Smith]

Hi,

I'm thinking of building a server for work and I'm looking for a CPU and
motherboard configuration with a low power consumption.

Any suggestions?

 

[kony]

Hi,

I'm thinking of building a server for work and I'm looking for a CPU and
motherboard configuration with a low power consumption.

Any suggestions?

How low? What performance level is necessary, what will the
box be doing exactly and for how many simultaneous clients?

Does it need be a server-class configuration, ie- server
chassis, motherboard, ECC memory, etc? If there's a budget,
that might be worth mentioning as well.

 

[Paul]

Hi,

I'm thinking of building a server for work and I'm looking for a CPU and
motherboard configuration with a low power consumption.

Any suggestions?

Get a Pentium-M and one of these.
http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/motherboards_d/AOpen/i915GMm-HFS/

http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=2354&s=2

There are also mini-itx boards with similar technology. This one
uses the slightly older 855GME (FSB400 only). The 915GM is a better
choice.

http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=2#p1630

The weakest link with Pentium-M, is getting decent cooling.
Even though it is a low power processor, some of the HSF
solutions aren't too good.

Pentium-M processors are pretty expensive. The top of the line
one (780 - 2.26GHz/FSB533/2MB L2) is $661, but you should get
decent performance with slightly slower ones. Pentium-M is faster
than the clock rate would suggest. The power listed here is 27W.

http://processorfinder.intel.com/scripts/details.asp?sSpec=SL7VB

The 915GM and 855GM chipsets should give the best power
characteristics, as they are mobile chipsets. Asus also
makes a CT479 adapter, for plugging a Pentium-M 479 pin
processor, into certain Asus S478 motherboards. But that
option runs the processor at full power all the time, which
at 27W would not be a big deal. (That option can give you
a board with more PCI slots for add-in cards, so shouldn't
be entirely rejected.)

There are likely Athlon64 products that could do something
similar, but I haven't been doing any reading on what
creative things have been done with Turion. The last
link is only included to show that there are motherboard
BIOS that recognize Turion. The fact that the dude burned
his out overclocking it, should not detract from its potential
as a low power solution

http://castle.pricewatch.com/s/search.asp?s=turion
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_12651_12659,00.html
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_609,00.html?redir=CPT301
http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=166713&page=5&pp=20

Paul