ECO-1: HTPC/Home Server build log [Minuet 350]

[Big.Wayne]

I have been thinking about building a SFF for quite some time and finally got the spare cash I needed to bring my ideas to life. The SFF craze is now in full swing and plenty of people have already put together all singing-all-dancing power-houses that rival full blown ATX machines however I wanted to try my hand at something different. . .

Recenty I have become a lot more interested in the Eco aspect of computing, its not something your average overclocker really considers and to be honest its not something I have paid a lot of attention to myself in the past but I did notice that as my overclocks got higher and the number of machines I owned increased so too did my electricity bill!

So I started to think about how I could go about being more eco-friendly and spent a week or two reading up about PC hardware power consumption etc. I also thought very hard about how I use my computers and what would be an ideal new machine to introduce into my home.

After looking at the power requirements of most modern gaming GPU's it became quite clear that I wouldn't be able to integrate a powerhouse like an nVidia 8800GT into the build as that just uses too much juice to be left running 24/7 but this isn't such a bad thing for me as I already have a custom built gaming rig that I fire up when the mood to frag comes over me!

So gaming aside what else will I be using this machine for?

• Watching TV, DVD, HD
• Recording TV
• Encoding DivX
• Video Editing
• Playing Music
• Surfing, Online Shopping, Banking etc
• Downloading
• Guest Machine
• Home Server?

Ok so that's a pretty modest list of requirements, the only thing there that obviously benefits from a fast machine is the Encoding/Video Editing. Ample hard disk space would be handy for all the video related stuff, and some hardware that is good at decoding HD films and making low quality DivX sparkle a bit more.

So what about form-factor? . . . well once you take gaming out the equation there is nothing stopping you from going low-profile, most of the hardware you need these days is built right into the motherboard and for all the rest of your hardware needs there is a fair few low profile options for sale.

I will be posting my progess in this thread and will try to include as many nice pictures as possible.

If you are an eco friendly system builder then hopefully you will find this thread interesting!

Constructive comments and encouragement welcome!

 

[Big.Wayne]

Have you considered underclocking/undervolting?

Undervolting for sure but not underclocking per se . . . but will be using EIST to lower the processor MHz when the system isn't under load.

I didn't mention it in the opening post but I intend to discuss every piece of hardware involved, why it is being used and how it is being set-up, bear with me though, I'm new to these build logs!

[edit] just unboxing the Minuet now, holy **** its well nice!

 

[Big.Wayne]

So lets get this show rolling. . . . first up the chassis and PSU. I had my eye on the ANTEC uATX series for quite some time, always thought the Minuet would be an interesting case to build in but as its low profile only I kinda ruled it out. When I realised that a powerful GPU would not be feasible for a low powered machine that gave me the green light to give the Minuet a whirl!

Antec Minuet 350 Home Page

Any system builder that has used an ANTEC case knows that they are decent. Any one of you that still hasn't tried an ANTEC chassis and is still knocking up wiz-bang PC's using £15 cases from the local computer fair really need to realise a little extra money spent of a good chassis is money very well spent.

I consider ANTEC to be one of the best bang for buck Chassis manufacturers around at the moment. They are by no means the best outright but a lot of us can't afford a swanky Coolermaster/Lian-Li/Silverstone/UFO.

Now as the name implies, the Minuet comes with a uATX 350W Energy Efficient PSU as standard! "350 watts!!!!!!!" I hear some of you cry, well for the build I have in mind that should be total overkill.

Here a close up of the MT-350 PSU . . . nice specs right?

The main stat that interests me the most about the included PSU is its 80Plus certification, It's a newish standard being used by reputable eco-friendly PSU manufacturers and its all about making better, more energy efficient computers. In the quest to cut down my carbon footprint and save the world (cough and my electricity bill) I will only buy and use 80 Plus certified PSU's from now on, I urge anyone reading to make a mental note and make sure that any PSU you buy carries 80 Plus certification too!

So that's it re my choice for uATX chassis and PSU, the icing on the cake is that you can buy the Minuet 350 for approx £60-£70 pound, not small money and not big money, just right

Now for some more pictures, hope you got unlimited bandwidth!

 

[Big.Wayne]

 

[Big.Wayne]

 

[Big.Wayne]

uATX motherboards have advanced in leaps and bounds the past few years but for some reason I never really took much notice of them before because I am an overclocker and have been happily using standard sized ATX motherboards for years. In the past it was the case that most uATX boards didn't overclock as well as their full sized ATX brothers and they also didn't have as many PCI slots for all your extra hardware, so that meant I never really got into them, I mean who wants a tiny quiet little PC when you could have a manly full sized tower featuring twelve 80mm YS-Tech screamers!!!

Anyway things have changed now on the uATX front and the recent motherboards have started making waves amongst the hardware geek elite. I mean just how much technology can you cram into one of these things!, a full quota of tweaking options in the BIOS, whats not to like?

Anyway when choosing a chipset you are also choosing a company, AMD or INTEL. I must admit I have taken my beady eye off AMD CPU's recently having been a happy Core2 Dup user for 18 months ish. The choice to me was simple. . . INTEL!

If anyone is well up on the latest AMD hardware, especially the low voltage tech then please feel free to share your knowledge here. I should have looked into it more carefully but after swatting over the Wolfdale/Yorkfield power consumption charts I was certain that INTEL held the aces?

So I made the choice to use INTEL hardware for this build however I was then faced with the choice of what INTEL chipset to use. The two main contenders were either the G33 or G35 with the latter being the most recent from INTEL. My days of buying utter bleeding edge hardware are well gone and I now normally go with the more mature option, leave all the younglings to spend their nights testing out new BIOSes. So by that token the G33 had appeal straight away because its had a bit more time to ripen and mature. However the graphics on the newer INTEL G35 chipsets were certainly more suited to a Low Powered HTPC build as a lot of the boards using this chipset feature a DVI port and HDMI connectivity, hmmm tough choice it was so I had to do some more reading up on the power consumption side of things.

It seemed the G33 uses less juice than the G35, not sure if that is soley due to the beefier IGP or that the chipset actually uses more watts? or a combination of the two?

As much as I wanted to use the IGP to power the visuals I still don't feel happy about having a graphics card soldered onto my motherboard, even though this build isn't intended to be a gaming machine and is limited to low profile cards I still wouldn't mind it being able to power a fraggin session of an older, less system hungry game. The main thing the graphics need to be good at though is displaying video of any type and while the G35 by all accounts is able to do a stella job of HD viewing I just have this feeling that a discreet graphics solution would be more up my street.

From a power savings point of view I think the IGP option may have been better but its nice to bend the rules here and there!

So I chose the cheaper G33 over the G35 and put the savings towards a dinky little GPU, worked out about a tenner more expensive doing it this way but hopefully it will be the right choice. . . .

ASUS P5K-VM Homepage

More pictures!

 

[Big.Wayne]

 

[Big.Wayne]

Not sure what an eco take on memory would be? I suppose the main thing would be the sticks can perform well while running on the least voltages possible. That kinda points to DDR3 which runs at 1.5v, sadly I'm not made of money so the next best thing would be DDR2 which has a standard voltage of 1.8v and is currently ridiculously cheap! (who would have thought you could buy a 2GB dual-channel kit of branded DDR2 memory for £30!!!).

So DDR2 it is then, but how much? (MCE2005 vs VISTA debate later), what brand? how many sticks? do you really need dual-channel? 5-5-5-15, 4-4-4-12, 3-3-3-6? 1t 2t? . . . EE-By-Gum, so many questions, not enough answers!

At this point I am not sure which applications really benefit from the added bandwidth you get from running dual-channel, I'm pretty sure all the video-related tasks will so that pushes me towards running two sticks. No doubt once I got this build complete I will do some testing and find out. The main goal will be to get the overall system wattage down without sacrificing performance. Can an extra stick of ram make all that much difference to the power draw? Not sure actually?

Same goes for memory timings, MHz and command rate, all things the Super-PI bencher will be very familiar with but how noticable will any of that be in real world usage?

Anyway for the Alpha stage of this build I am going with a 2GB (2x1GB) kit of Crucial DDR2-667 (CT2KIT12864AA667). They are happy running at 1.8vDimm @333MHz 4-4-4-12 or with the same 1.8vDimm but @400MHz 5-5-5-15.

Some may question the use of memory that don't have any heatspreaders attached? At 1.8vDimm the memory does get warm but certainly not hot, not sure if that will be true once I get them installed inside the machine and have the case closed . . . No heatspreaders certainly means less waste metal, thats kinda eco ain't it?

Now I only just became aware that some hardware products contain lead, it was during an MacBook Air keynote speech by Steve Jobs and he made a point of letting the crowd know this latest product was Lead Free. Don't really know much about Lead but I gather its a good thing its being slowly phased out from computer hardware? If you have further info on Lead and which products use it please let me know thanks!

Now some more pictures!

 

[Big.Wayne]

So we come to storage, I had to give this one a lot of thought. At first I was all set to buy a single Mahoosive 1TB 3.5" disk but as I intend to do some video editing I had concerns about data contention. I am led to believe by those that know it is a bad idea to read & write from the same disk, kinda makes sense although I think they were talking abit more about really high end stuff like editing HD or such like. Aside from video editing I can see that its very likely I will be watching a TV recording at the same time as making a TV recording, maybe even downloading some stuff to boot!

Due to the ethos of this build I found it hard to justify installing two 3.5" due to the noise, heat and power consumption having both drives would entail so kinda found myself looking at drives intended for use in laptops, yes those little 2.5" units. I'm aware that a number of you have been using 2.5" drives for a fair while, I've read your posts and heard all the praise you guys have given the little laptop wonders (like how cool n quiet they are!) but for some reason I didn't bite?

After pouring through dozens of data sheets its became obvious to me that 2.5" drives were the way forward. Taking it to the extreme I believe that SSD (Solid-State-Drives) is what I really wanted but again I'm not that rich and SSD will have to wait on the shelf along with DDR3 for the time being, although I can see the time is not too far away when SSD capacity and price makes it more of a reality to own a few of them. I didn't even bother reading the SSD data sheets but if any of you know the tech specs power consumption wise I would be interested to know.

So once again by going with 2.5" drives I feel I took the middle ground between regular 3.5" and Solid State.

Even after finally making that decision I was yet again confront by choices, SATA 1, SATA2, 4,200rpm, 5,400rpm, 7,200rpm???? gosh its an immense workload on the old grey matter I can tell you.

What about capacity? number of platters? Areal Density? NCQ?

Do you get the picture?

So I decided to buy the biggest 5,400rpm 2.5" drives that I could afford and made sure they were stacked to the gills with all the latest tech to try and make up for the lack of spindle speed. Having used 7,200rpm drives for years (and years) I am interested to see if I can notice the difference in Real World Usage

In the past when it came to hard drives all I cared about were HD-Tach scores and Far-Cry level loading times, now I'm looking at disks with a fresh perspective and I put the latest 3.5" drives into the same catagory as powerful GPU's, that is they are good while you use them but maybe they are not suitable for an Eco machine that will be running 24/7?

I'm aware there are one or two Green 3.5" HDD's floating about, ones that run on reduced power but I didn't have time to read the data sheets. If you know anything about these drives lets hear about it please.

The only downside I see to using laptop disks is the cost per Gigabyte, you can get so much more storage space by using 3.5" disks but the real cost has to be that the bigger drives use almost *six* times the amount of power of the laptop disks . . . based on that I think I made the right choice?

Momentus® 5400.4 Home Page

 

[Big.Wayne]

Not that I'm using a 3.5" drive in this build but I thought the folks who have never seen a laptop hardrive may appreciate these pictures to get a better sense of scale!

 

[Big.Wayne]

i would like to know on what options your thinking of going for?.

Hiya Tosk, sorry about taking time to reply but hopefully you got a better ideal of what I'm building now. Depending on how much of a rush you are in I would suggest let be get ECO-1 up and running so testing can begin, then we can draw out conclusions from the end product. I would be very interested to see a similar build using AMD kit as I'm sure that would also rock, however the thing that tipped me towards INTEL is that apart from the regular HTPC duties I am keen to do lots of video editing and I think a Core2 system will be hard to beat in that area?

In essence I think my foundations are good but as always there is scope for improvement. If I'm not happy with the end result then it will be straight back to the drawing board for a redesign!

 

[Big.Wayne]

Very impressed with the case.

Hello m8,

yes tis a pretty nice case actually, very hard to beat for the price! It's a little cramped in some areas but it seems the bulk of the extra wiring gets shoved away out of sight under the drive bay area leaving the motherboard zone pretty free.

Not sure I like the idea of using it standing on its side, seems a bit weird having the optical drive vertical?. Think I'm gonna be using it horizontally in the normal desktop position.

Also got some ideas for modding but will have to get some thermal testing done first to see how it handles the heat, stay tuned!

 

[Big.Wayne]

Its an interesting project, I don't think I've seen a build approached from this point of view before. Its a shame you can't get those heat-powered fans yet, they'd be perfect for this!

Hiya PK, I'm glad you have subscribed and are interested in the project, its one of those things I mulled over in my mind for ages but never actually got around to doing it. I really need to have a static machine running my TV and stuff because normally everytime I rebuild my main machine I'm without TV, Internet etc so it will be nice to still be able to surf and stuff while I'm tearing my main machine apart.

I gather quite a few folk have a laptop for that scenario and I was tempted to buy one instead of doing this build but I think I personally will get more benefit from having this HTPC and if it works out well then I will start building them for clients and friends.

Btw whats the Heat-Power-Fans all about? sounds interesting?

 

[Big.Wayne]

you put in a gfx card BUT use the onboard most of the time and only enable in BIOS when you wanna frag?

Would this completely cut the power to the redundant gfx card ?

That sounds like Hybrid-Graphics which is a feature of the new AMD 780G chipset although you would still be restricted by the choice of low-profile graphics cards you could use. In a chassis that accepts normal sized cards them maybe that would be a good option from an Eco point of view. I'm not sure exactly how Hybrid-Graphics works and if it does infact cut the wattage to the second descreet GPU when you are just surfing and stuff?

I seen some early results and they show benchmarks getting better when both IGP & GPU are working togther so there are deffo some good aspects about it. If it does indeed only power the GPU when it needs extra 3D Oompphh that would be idea, I just wonder how much wattage that would use though power both IGP + GPU?

 

[Big.Wayne]

the IGP on the 780G AMD boards are supposed to be very good (and capable of xfire if you need a bit more power for gaming) and as you say sticking to an IGP may save you some wattage. But as it looks like you've already bought your mobo perhaps its a moot point. that aside, looks like a great project. I think i'll be following suit....

Yup from what little I read it does appear to work nicely, still plenty of bugs to be ironed out as its brand new tech so that kinda pushed me toward a more mature product, I do like the easy life!

Hopefully soon when I've made some more progress I can comment further on the IGP vs Descreet GPU debate. For HD and stuff like that it seems the IGP on the 780G is working fine although I am waiting for the hype to settle a bit to get some more sober opinions, as it stands the technical press gets somewhat over-excited about anything new!

There is no way I have the headspace to have approached this project using a new AMD chipset . . . I'm still just getting my head around some of the options on the INTEL chipsets!

 

[Big.Wayne]

Tbh I would have gone for a 780G as it's fast as IGP's go and has full decoding of AVC and VC-1 via DXVA.
I'd suggest having a look at a picoPSU or two.

Well there is nothing stopping you! would be good to have someone using a 780G to compare results with but as already stated above I'm not really into installing a chipset that is utter bleeding edge but I will read up more on it when I have time (no timer, no time!) I sound like the mad hatter from Alice in Wonderland!

That picoPSU looks very interesting, never heard of that before so thanks for the heads up!

 

[Big.Wayne]

This is a really interesting project mate, I will be keeping check on it

I am in a similar position with my htpc in regards to searching for low power computing

Hello Agr3sive,

Good to see there are a few of us interested in eco-computing, I thought maybe no one would join me in the thread lol!

Hopefully when I made some more progress we will have a better idea of whats good and whats not so good, I tried to give it as much thought as possible before commiting but I didn't speak with anyone about my ideas beforehand because I felt I would be struck down by analysis-paralysis and fail to do any more than just talk about it (and talk some more!).

I'm trying to be a man of action now and just do the best I can then draw my conclusions from the finished result. I don't think I made any clangers so far!

Yes I have a nice low voltage cpu to get going with, will make a post on that soon, very similar to yours actually. Its a pity my motherboard only goes as low as 1.1vCore though!

 

[Big.Wayne]

I take it you like gladiator
Good one on the hard drives. Hope it all goes well.

You should have looked at getting a board that supports 478 pin core 2 duo laptop chips.
I've got myself a Commell LV 667DC which has a 120 Watt power adapter built in and only needs the input. It can then power the hard drive the optical drive and pcie lane off the board aswell as the built in graphics if needed and the cpu.
I've got a T2600 chip (2.16Ghz FSB667) which has a power consumption of 34Watts

Well I could only do so much research before it felt like my head was going to explode (like that dude from Scanners!). I have read a bit about that newish form factor that uses laptop motherboards but installed in a smallish low profile PC chassis, can't remember what its called though?

Thing is my Eco-Computing career has only just started and I got a lot to learn and a lot of hardware to play with before I get anywhere near mastering it, its like a different game with a whole new set of rules and items!

In essence though this is my first practical test and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Once I'm finished I will be able to draw my own conclusions and if its not right I can start again, its not a tattoo luckily!

[edit] why use a 3.5" SATA drive when u could use a 2.5" SATA drive?

 

[Big.Wayne]

"What no BluRay??? what kind of HTPC is this???"

Hehe, well the simple answer is I don't own any BluRay disks just yet and the actual drives are still pretty expensive! I am mulling over whether or not this build requires a full time optical drive? I mean for the most part it would be handy but while it isn't being used the drive will continue to drain wattage.

It is possible now to download HD content using iTunes and I'm sure there are others HD content providers. There will also be more and more High-Def content being broadcast over regular Terrestrial-TV. Looking to the future I'm not sure if the optical drive isn't going the way of the dodo.

One solution that may work quite well is using an external eSata drive that can be plugged/unplugged as required, I still got a wodge of DVDs that I like to watch however these are slowly being backed up to DivX using the fantastic Gordian Knot package. Of course there is the question of software installs and in this respect I think an eSata unit could also work quite well.

Anyway in the meantime I will install a regular multi-purpose optical drive until I can research BlueRay drives a bit more. I have no idea at this point what the power draw is of a DVD-RW or BluRay, I wonder if the latter uses more juice?

Had a quick flick through the latest SATA DVD-RW drives and they all look pretty decent, requirements wise I'm not sure if some drives are more green than others (will look into it) but SATA instead of IDE works well due to the SFF space constraints (less bulky cables etc), its also worth making sure the unit is shorter as some drives are still quite long.

So my quick n dirty choice of a temporary drive has to be the SONY DRU-190S Retail, its includes NERO software and has a choice of snap on Bezels (I'm not sure if a Black or Silver drive will look best ya see!). Also the SONY logo on the unit will lend itself to the overall look of a tiny electronic consumer device I am after!

Akio Morita & Masaru Ibuka

 

[Big.Wayne]

Here is my original Core2 Duo processor purchased December 2006, cost me £111 on special offer! The E6400 cost approx £145 and the E6600 cost around £200 so it really was the bang-for-buck CPU at the time. I have pretty much ran it 24/7 since then at between 2800MHz-3200MHz using stock-ish voltages, great overclocking chip but needs a really good FSB motherboard to fly!

I think it was only about two-three months ago when I swapped out the ASUS P5B-Deluxe for the newer P5K-E that I really started to test the chip, I was aiming to run it at about 3500MHz in my gaming system but before I tested its max MHz I thought I would see how the chip ran when undervolted and then work my way up.

I set the vCore to 1.325v (its rated stock vCore) and started priming for 30mins, then I would drop the voltage down one notch and test again. . .

1.325v
1.300v
1.275v
1.250v
1.225v
1.200v
1.175v
1.150v
1.125v
1.100v (minimum vCore setting in my BIOS)

Well I was quite suprised the computer even booted let alone pass prime testing at 1.1vCore?

So then leaving the vCore at the minimal setting I started overclocking the chip to see if it has any headroom in it and managed to get it up from 1862MHz to 2331Mhz, not bad at all.

Having got more into Video-Editing the past few months I am pretty sure that a quad-core is the way to go but from an eco point of view its got to be a quad using the new Yorkfield core, however these are hard to get hold of atm and are also quite pricey! I have looked at the Q9300, Q9450 and the QX9650 and I reckon the Q9450 is the chip for me, just got to play the waiting game now so in the meantime the E6300 gets the job! Once I get to testing the units power consumption I may well take off the overclock to save myself a few watts, we will have to wait and see!