Energy efficent server build advice

coolamasta

coolamasta

coolamasta

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9 Jan 2010
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Sunny Brizzol
Hi all, I need to build the most "green" energy efficient server I can but not sure what hardware to use! Below are my requirements so any advice on which Motherboard, CPU and PSU to use would be much appreciated, this is what I have already:

  • Antec 300 case
  • Various DDR2/3 RAM
  • Adaptec PCIe raid card
  • 6 x SATA harddrives (2 x 500GB WD RAID series, 2 x 1TB and 2 x 2TB)

My requirements of the motherboard are:
  • Onboard graphics
  • At least 1 Gigabit LAN
  • At least 4 SATA slots
  • Be VMware capable, IE virtualisation must be supported in the BIOS

Im not bothered if its a AMD or Intel platform as long as its energy efficient which is my no.1 concern, I know im being quite specific but hope someone can advise me as im not that clued up this end of the market as im normally building high power overclocked rigs! haha

Cheers :cool:
 
I'm fairly sure the atom mini-itx boards will fulfill your requirements, possibly not virtualisation.

Could you state the performance you need from the machine? My brief play with virtual machines lead to the conclusion that one cannot ever have enough ram, and the more processing power the better. Neither of these are terribly compatible with energy efficiency.

I'm considering the supermicro x7spa-h for a low power home server, but I wouldn't be using half a dozen 3.5" hard drives with it, nor doing anything dramatic with virtual machines.
 
Thanks chaps been doing me own research as well and decided to go for an Antec 380W EarthWatts PSU, a Giagbyte GA-G41M-ES2L G41 (Socket 775) Mobo and I found a spare E4300 1.8ghz dual core s775 Intel CPU sat about which OK is not the most efficient CPU in the world but should be more than enough! :)

Just for info it will be running Win Server 2003 Enterprise as its native OS and only 1 Win XP virtual machine using VMware Server II, 4GB RAM with 768MB assigned to the VM which should make everything run nice and hopefully relativity low powered :)

If anyone is interested I will measure its wattage pull next week when built and let you know?
 
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