Low power media server

teaboy5 · 17 Jul 2015 at 01:27

Hey

At the moment i am running windows home server on an old pc with a q6600 in there. Idle it's running at around 100w with some hard drives in there.

I would like to get the power consumption down a little or is this possible?

Is it worth buying a new board and an I3 and some green hard drives? All I use it for is to download some files too and stream the odd file, but I don't want to get rid of a full blown OS so don't want to go down the route of a NAS.

wellibob · 17 Jul 2015 at 07:55

My Haswell i3 server with 5 green drives consumes about 39w at Idle max. So yes you can reduce it. However cost to get this is upto you

Armageus · 17 Jul 2015 at 09:26

Have you got all the Processor Power settings turned on in the BIOS, and customised the Windows Power Plan (e.g. tweak the Balanced one rather than the Performance/Always On one).

Spin down the Hard Drives when not in use? (although this is subjective - as you get a delay when you do want to use them, and spin up/down can cause them to fail sooner)

If using an overclocking board, then underclock and undervolt the processor depending on your requirements - e.g. see this thread
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18576520

Tealc · 17 Jul 2015 at 13:04

To buy new kit to save energy is never going to work out as an overall cost saving in the short term. Even at 60W extra of consumption you are only looking at £70 odd per year in extra energy use. How much would it cost you to buy a new system and drives?

Go with Armageus' idea and see where it can save you a few watts here and there.

Armageus · 17 Jul 2015 at 13:28

Depending on the board and your usage (e.g. if you can get away with 2 cores), you could always swap to a E5300 for £2 e.g.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-Dual-Core-2-60GHZ-2MB-800MHZ-E5300-SLGTL-/271905404523

The E5300 are rated @ 65W vs 105W/95W for the Q6600 (depending on revision) - just depends on what motherboard you have as to whether 45nm CPUs were supported or not.

There are low powered Quads available e.g. Q8200S/Q9400S/Q9450S etc, but they are in essence just voltage binned version of normal chips, rare (and consequently expensive if you can find them), and you can achieve similar results by undervolting your existing CPU.

teaboy5 · 17 Jul 2015 at 19:00

I was just going to keep an eye out on members market for an i3 and a board. In regards to the drives I wouldn't be replacing them as the watt difference between a green drive and a not so one is a total saving of around 1 to 2 pounds a year. So I have read anyway