Best option for a low power rig?

[Mercutio]

Would need to have a minimum of 2 1x PCIe slots.

It's doing homebrew NAS duties, if I can I'd prefer more cores and lower power per core.

Happy to consider underclocking etc to get power down.

 

[Doomedspeed]

For NAS' a popular choice is the low power i3.

Is there a reason you need more cores?

 

[wildman_33]

Hoaw about a socket AM1 setup?

YOUR BASKET
1 x AMD Athlon 5350 2.05GHz Quad Core Processor - Retail (Socket AM1) £41.99
1 x Asus AM1M-A AMD AM1 (Socket FS1b) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard £25.99
Total : £77.58 (includes shipping : £8.00).



Although they do only have single channel ram and you are limited to 16gb due to only having two DIMMs. An i3 setup would most likely perform a bit better but this will use less power. I'm guessing you would install a raid card as this motherboard has no built in raid and only had two Sata ports.

You could go for one of the slower processors available too, this motherboard alows overclocking too.

 

[los]

You could also use a G3220 and a H81 board.

 

[Mercutio]

For NAS' a popular choice is the low power i3.

Is there a reason you need more cores?

SMB 3.0 in windows 8 (aka windows file sharing). If you have more cores you can get better transfer speeds if you got the bandwidth between boxes

I'll take a look at the I3 though

Hoaw about a socket AM1 setup?

YOUR BASKET
1 x AMD Athlon 5350 2.05GHz Quad Core Processor - Retail (Socket AM1) £41.99
1 x Asus AM1M-A AMD AM1 (Socket FS1b) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard £25.99
Total : £77.58 (includes shipping : £8.00).



Although they do only have single channel ram and you are limited to 16gb due to only having two DIMMs. An i3 setup would most likely perform a bit better but this will use less power. I'm guessing you would install a raid card as this motherboard has no built in raid and only had two Sata ports.

You could go for one of the slower processors available too, this motherboard alows overclocking too.

I'll give that a serious look. Extremely low power and more cores are the main priorities here. The box won't do much else so "power" isn't so needed.

That might be a winner. There's a possibility of a raid card (my perc 5i) but I was considering going with something doing proper "journalling" like zfs so bit corruption and the write hole issues are completely removed. My cards good but doesn't cover me for those.
Basic intention is for the NAS box to have a high bandwidth link to my main box and be treated as almost server level (speed wise) network attached storage (e.g most of my steam folder would be on the NAS) while other machines in the house use standard gigabit.