Low power components?

Bossk128 · 12 Nov 2010 at 10:27

I'm trying to gather parts for a cheap always-on server but having difficulty identifying lower power parts.

So far I can get a cheap system thus:

Asrock N68C-S UCC
AMD Sempron 140 or 145
2Gb DDR3

Is the motherboard/chipset particularly power hungry? Can I get a thriftier CPU? I probably don't need 2.7GHz (although unlocking to a dual might be nice), it's for Squeezecentre, 5 year old game servers, on Linux.

Wiki shows some lower model AM3 CPUs but I can't seem to find them for sale? I have a power supply which I'll use in the short term, but are there 'low power' power supplies that will be suitable for this, e.g. 80%+ efficiency 120W PSUs?

Cheers!

95thrifles · 12 Nov 2010 at 10:30

Not sure how cheap youre on about, but something like this would be best for the low power consumption side of things

Bossk128 · 12 Nov 2010 at 10:39

Wow, lighting response! Well, at the mo the parts are about £80 as I'm replacing the guts of my hobo ORIGINAL Sempron system. Plus, I do need a certain amount of power for Squeezecenter. I've never tried it but reading up suggests it is pretty sluggish on single core Atoms, so a dual core may not help much. I'll have a browse for top speed Atoms and see how far I get.

Brian8bit · 12 Nov 2010 at 10:50

Top speed atom is the D525 @ 1.8Ghz or there abouts. Personally, I'd go for a dual core Athlon II.