10w processor + 2 PCI-e?

Mercutio

Mercutio

Mercutio

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There's a fair amount of the atom processors around at 10w TDP. Is anyone aware of a chip+board combo in the range that will yield 2x pcie slots?

Alternatively, anything else at this sort of power level with 2xpcie slots (they need to be at least 4x each)
 
Half the problem with Atom is the chipset can consume as much or more power than the CPU.

I'd suggest a bare basics 1155 , 1150 mobo with celeron processor

I have a s1155 celeron G530 in a H61 mitx board which pulls 18W AC from the wall socket idle and 40W from the wall socket under max load including an SSD. While a mitx only has one PCI-E I'm sure you could pick up a mATX H61 or H81 board, single dimm and a low end processor which won't consume much more than an atom system.

on a side note I have an an AM2 X2 1.6Ghz 250U dual core 25W processor which draws more at idle than a 3Ghz X4 640.... as the system is mostly at idle it's cheaper to run with the 640 and a much better experience.

Might help if you specify the application or any special requirements ... e.g. battery life

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Tis basically for something to leave on for homebrew NAS work. Need basically the lowest power setup possible that can handle 2 PCIe cards at 4x or above (raid 5 card and 10GBe NIC - I know these will add a bit to total W draw at the wall - guessing around 10w per card) 4x WD reds which are around 7w per drive while sleeping and about 15w each during operations.

Aiming to come in under 100w (drives asleep) if possible.

If the chip and board as suggested are 10w idle/40w load I should be well "under budget".
 
You'd be well to work out how much you are paying for electricity vs cost of new bits. I *might* take a ridiculous length of time to recoup the cost of a brand new 1155 board and CPU rather than using just a cheap/old setup which uses more power
 
Well the X4 640 with a DVB tuner, Sat HD tuner, 5 HDD, 1 SSD pulls less than 100W running Prime95 but has the poke when needed.

A dual core sandy bridge celeron should be plenty to run a NAS, either that or a pentium

Surprised on the 10GBe as a single drive is quite close to GBe providing you have decent usually intel Nics

H61 won't have the extra PCI-E x16, B75 /H77 might be ok and should come with a good range of HDD options

most of the time it will be idle, if you spin down the drives it should be less than 50W most of the time

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Edit

I suspect atom would't cope with 10GBe which rules that out. Have you considered teamed GBe ?
 
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My home server consists of the following and pulls around 60w at the wall while copying across the network, while running a FreeNAS and windows 7 Virtual machine using ESXi

Gigabyte 78LMT-S2
Sempron x2 190
8Gb 1333mhz DDR3
1x WD Red 1tb
1x Unknown sata laptop drive
1x Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB
Intel 10/100/1000 PCI NIC
Corsair CX500M
 
Ye, the 10GBe is so I can map the drives with a few additional tricks and make windows on my main box think the raid I'll be plugging into this is a local drive :)

Got the network side of it about covered. The raid card can do around 400MB/sec in raid 5 with the right amount of drives, I'm rather used to the speed and wanted to move all my storage to one box in the house, backups etc are then easier too.

All eggs in one basket etc I know but raid 5 + backups means I can keep the data safe, the box will be built with some thought towards making sure power + cooling needs are covered and short of dodgy hardware I doubt I'll have much issue, not had any kit fail me in a significant amount of time. The raid controller is battery backed too so there's no issues on power cut etc even with higher performance options set.

Cost of hardware wise I'll need to buy something regardless and the shopping list looks pretty cheap as things sit.

Edit: checking the celeron processors at the moment (admittedly its G550) it lists it as a 65w part. Checked the listing for the G530 and it's listed as 65w too. We sure on the readings from the setup you had decto?
 
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Have you considered just using an old machine and letting it go to sleep when it's not in use. Unless you are actually accessing the array all day this will save considerably more energy and build money than any low power, always-on, design ever could.

I've just picked up an old mATX board from the members market for £25 to swap with my old P5Q Pro specifically for the integrated graphics, just to run my 8TB array.

When booted it automatically fires up a VM with Linux to pool the drives and then iTunes for my Apple TV, Calibre Server for the misses Kindle library and Air Video Server. Will probably run a Minecraft server on there as well at some point.

Once it's up and running it's set to automatically sleep and then wake via a magic packet. The only inconvenience is having to fire the magic packet at it first, but I can do that from my phone from anywhere as long I as I have signal. I'd rather it woke automatically upon a network request but I'm not sure how to achieve that yet, assuming it's possible.

Spec:
Asus P5E-WM HDMI
Intel Q9450
1 OS Drive - (Considering replacing this with a thumb drive to get power usage even lower)
4 2TB WD Green drives
1 DVB-T Tuner

Edit: Regarding processors listed TDP's.

Firstly, I believe Intel are referring specifically to the amount of heat that the processor is capable of putting out with this figure, not how much energy they use. For example a 65W TDP processor will require a heatsink capable of radiating 65W of heat to keep the CPU under the Tjunction.
It does however allow a rough comparison of the power requirements of various processors as generally the higher it is the more power will be required.
I'm not sure if AMD use the number the same way or not.

Secondly, That figure is assuming a certain amount of load which a NAS almost certainly will never reach.
 
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Mercutio said:
Ye, the 10GBe is so I can map the drives with a few additional tricks and make windows on my main box think the raid I'll be plugging into this is a local drive :)

Got the network side of it about covered. The raid card can do around 400MB/sec in raid 5 with the right amount of drives, I'm rather used to the speed and wanted to move all my storage to one box in the house, backups etc are then easier too.

All eggs in one basket etc I know but raid 5 + backups means I can keep the data safe, the box will be built with some thought towards making sure power + cooling needs are covered and short of dodgy hardware I doubt I'll have much issue, not had any kit fail me in a significant amount of time. The raid controller is battery backed too so there's no issues on power cut etc even with higher performance options set.

Cost of hardware wise I'll need to buy something regardless and the shopping list looks pretty cheap as things sit.

Edit: checking the celeron processors at the moment (admittedly its G550) it lists it as a 65w part. Checked the listing for the G530 and it's listed as 65w too. We sure on the readings from the setup you had decto?
Click to expand...

Hi,

I was using the combo to test minimum power draw from a number of power supplies in the 300 - 450w and a pico PSU. I have three of the plug in the wall power meters that read pretty much the same. One thing to consider is the PSU, if you over specify thus you reduce the overall efficiency.

Sandy bridge power consumption is excellent at idle, pair this with a basic motherboard and consumption is very low. If you buy a higher spec overclocking board then having more VRM's will be less efficient and any other USB 3.0, fancy sound chip, fan headers, etc. all add the the base power consumption.

The G550 is just a slightly higher clocked G530, the idle clocks and consumption should be the same and these chips are well under the 65W TDP even at full load.

The only thing I don't know is how well a G550 will cope with that volume of data but then worst case, you can swap the CPU without needing to change the platform.

Here is a link with some power consumption figures ... as you see it got totally no love!

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18487594&highlight=username_decto

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Seems there's a few mATX options with 2+ PCIe and uber basic chipset so that and a celeron will be pretty damned cheap. Will see how far I get, holidays coming so will be a few weeks before I take the plunge :)

The celeron only needs to keep oversight on the PCIe bus, all the raid 5 calculations etc are done in hardware on the card (for a £60 card they are excellent, you can get 1000MB+ out of it in raid 10, around 400MB in raid 5, will need to find the sweet spot for throughput from more drives vs calculating each drives share of the data) so there's no real issue with lack of grunt. The 10gbe nic will be fully hardware too.
 
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