Help me spec energy efficient PC

Ingleberry

Ingleberry

Ingleberry

Associate
Joined
16 Jul 2010
Posts
154
Location
London
Hi Overclockers, after some guidance please planning to upgrade my cad/camm pc workstation within next month or two the nature of my work its on 24/7 processing data, running simulations and any reasonable ways to reduce my electric bill a real consideration in my upgrade. My workstation is knocking on a decade old now although its served me well definitely time for upgrade to latest technology. To be frank I am totally bewildered with vast variety of options available these days shops visited just spurt strings of numbers and letters pushing me into what seems a biased sale.

Not sure model of my case its Antec branded yes its old yet still looks discreet and modern i like to retain, it has space for 2x80mm fans on front and 2x80mm rear of case (all currently unused) and PSU located up top. My current motherboard is old dual socket cpu in E-ATX format, from the motherboard to inside edge of case is approx 110mm deep if that makes a difference since today’s coolers look massive compared to my current coolers which are matchbox size!

I never play games so I’m happy to sacrifice 3D gaming prowess however running lots of office and internet apps heavy multi-tasking being able to play latest HD content and blueray is as much graphics power my work demands. With it being kept on all the time processing data in the background could this be called idle? Im on Windows XP Pro most of my software I doubt is multi threaded being old as it is however planning to upgrade all my software to latest version in next 6 months which definitely takes advantage of multiple core/threads (dont know the difference) would I be better off upgrading to Windows7 now? My main issue is motherboard which can at minimum support latest high end 6 core cpu that’s well laid out with reasonable access and upgrade path with latest i/o standards is priority. Hard disk wise my work is very data intensive must have reliable fast hard drives 500Gb be ample for now really need some suggestions here, is going raid worth while? is it like double the performance or more like 20% faster? Ram 4gb with room to upgrade, ram specs I have no idea same with PSU preferably one that doesn’t sound like a helicopter within a year be great.

And ofcourse budget around £500
 
The fastest processors burn more electricity than the slower ones. The 32nm CPUs burn less electricity than the 45nm.

One option could be something built around the Intel Q6950 which is a dual core socket 1166 CPU from Intel which can overclock up stupidly high and has integrated Graphics onboard. You could pair it with a mATX board to save yourself 20W or so. I assume that your case while it fits E-ATX will also fit mATX and ATX. A 90% efficient PSU will be expensive but will also save you a considerable amount of power.

Or perhaps something built around the 32nm i3 530 which is also very overclockable.

The stock coolers on both Intel choices here would be small and would fit without issues.

Or even a pre-overclocked bundle..
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BU-042-OE&groupid=43&catid=339&subcat=

to which you'd add the other bits and bobs.

Such as Hard Drive, Samsung F3 500GB http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-081-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=940 or 1TB http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-082-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1279

I think you might struggle to go Intel quad core with the budget, unless you go second hand.

Maybe AMD? I don't know much about AMD and what's good and what's bad, overclockable or not.
 
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I think for my usage idle power consumption is more important than load, with that in mind which would offer best balance of performance and power consumption AMD Athlon Phenom or Intel i3 i5?

Looking at overclockers today attempted to spec AMD build I like the following board seems to have good reviews has onboard graphic and sound after that got stuck with selecting cpu, cpu cooler and psu

Asus M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 AMD 890GX (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard £119.99

OCZ Gold 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 (1333MHz) Low-Voltage Dual Channel (OCZ3G1333LV4GK) £79.99

Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (WD6402AAEX) £55.99

ps my work is very hdd intensive is there better hdd drive 500gb-1tb ? any benefit going raid with 2 cheaper drives?
 
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If your work is critical you should be wary of raid, unless you build in extra drives to back up your data for some fault tolerance. The Samsung F3 1GB drives are good and fast too. The WD green drives are low power drives but do run slower than standard drives.

IMO intel solutions are lower power/higher performance as they use a more modern process.

For a low power system with onboard graphics a 400w corsair supply would be ample, maybe even a swift ocuk supply but you'll sacrifice some efficiency.
 
Whats your budget?
I would go for something like the
Athlon x2 240e
Corsair C300 64gb ssd
Samsung f3 1tb
Asus M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 AMD 890GX (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard
OCZ Gold 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 (1333MHz) Low-Voltage Dual Channel (OCZ3G1333LV4GK)
Then get something like a Seasonic X650 which have high efficiency
 
My loose budget around £500 or more if value for money, nature of my work is very heavy data processing and simulations much like high end gaming without the need for powerful GPU if that makes sense? I have an external company come in for backups secured off site once a week but loosing a weeks work or any downtime would be very costly for me.

I only need about 100-150gb of application storage on my workstation with very heavy on read and writes 24/7. With this in mind is it best to keep temp and cache file on ssd or seperate on hdd?

In the real world would 1xssd give similar performance 2x fast hdd in raid0?

With 1xssd as main drive then 1xhdd can the hdd powered totally down when not used or do they always draw some current when idle? Or would i better off with 2x ssd in raid0?

thank you Tealc and Biz.Kid09
 
True been reading up on ssd seems to be unsuitable for me with very write intensive work, boot times irrelavent too the damn things on all the time. But i can still budget a ssd on amd build, not on intel.

unsure which is the quickest drive out the 2 listed below?


Product Name Qty Price Line Total
Asus M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 AMD 890GX (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard £119.99
(£102.12) £119.99
(£102.12)
AMD Athlon II X4 Quad Core 635 2.90GHz (Socket AM3) - Retail £76.36
(£64.99) £76.36
(£64.99)
OCZ Gold 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 (1333MHz) Low-Voltage Dual Channel (OCZ3G1333LV4GK) £72.84
(£61.99) £72.84
(£61.99)
Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (WD6402AAEX) £55.99
(£47.65) £55.99
(£47.65)
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (HD103SJ) £44.99
(£38.29) £44.99
(£38.29)
Corsair CX 400W ATX Power Supply (CMPSU-400CXUK) £29.99
(£25.52) £29.99
(£25.52)
Sub Total : £340.56
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DPD Next Day Parcel
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £9.50
VAT is being charged at 17.50% VAT : £61.26
Total : £411.32
 
With limited writes on SSD I think it'd be a poor choice for your setup. Also SSD are slower in certain scenarios due to the way they write in larger blocks (or something).

I would go F3 too. Good speed and cost is good too.
 
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