Low power SSF - Is this possible?

Amp34

Amp34

Amp34

Caporegime
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I'm looking to get a small download/"other" box that I want to run 24/7 so it needs to be low powered and very quiet/silent. The difficulty is it needs to be reasonably powerful at the same time and I'm not sure how far the tech has come yet...

As above I'm looking for 24/7 operation using Windows and a couple of GB RAM. Alongside that I would like it to be about as powerful as the first gen dual core processors (comparative to an AMD x2 4400) if possible. Add to that a mid size hard drive (no bigger than 500GB say) and that's about it.

Looks wise I don't care but smaller the better really, cost as cheap as possible but the most important part is it needs to be cheap to run. I'm guessing ITX is the way to go? Unfortunately I really have no idea about this area of the market! Self build or off the shelf, doesn't bother me.

Any suggestions or am I living in a dream world?:p
 
If you check out the In-Win itx cases, they come with inclusive PSU ranging between 120w to 200w depending on the model.

I had an e8400, zotac 9300 wifi mobo, 4GB DDR2, 320GB 7200 3.5" HDD installed in one of their 120w cases.
It was a tight fit and I replaced their stock 80mm fan with a decent Noctua one (the stock one wasn't quiet enough), but it ran without a hiccup for two years until I recently upgraded my case.
My plug power draw meter stated it hit about 105w under prime stress test.

They're dinky little cases too.
 
I have a single core Atom, 1GB RAM and a 2TB HDD in an above mentioned In-Win, pulls 30w at the plug.
 
Thanks, I'll keep that in mind although I was hoping for a little less power draw than even that. I don't know, for example, how powerful new Atom processors are, or whether you can get low power ITX MBs with laptop processors in which I assume would reduce power draw considerably without compromising power.

I just found this website http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+T7500+@+2.20GHz which puts the sort of "power" i'm looking for into perspective! 1,200 or so!

EDIT: That was for mcwildcard. 30W sounds nice, how does the system perform?
 
For example just looking around the ULV i3 processors look nice for my needs (eg the i3-380UM ~17W and I assume relatively similar performance wise to the old x2 4400) but is there something like that that I can buy off the shelf? I think even the newest Atoms just won't be quite powerful enough and a full fat processor will be overkill and use up too much power.

Obviously this thing won't need to decode or encode HD video or play games on so GFX isn't important.
 
Amp34 said:
EDIT: That was for mcwildcard. 30W sounds nice, how does the system perform?
Click to expand...

It's a bit slow, but then only running 1GB of RAM in Win7 would do that.

2GB would probably see a marked improvement, but I can't justify the outlay for a dedicated torrentbox.

The D410 Atom I have is around the same speed as an old XP1700+ (lol).
 
Without knowing the "other" usage for the system its difficult to say, but my Atom N330 seems to handle usenet downloads fairly well. Perhaps not the fastest for parity repairs but it gets the job done without costing the planet in power consumption.
 
Get the G620 with an intel motherboard and some low voltage ddr3 ram. Use a picopsu to power it and you will have a sub 25w system but a lot more grunt than the e350/atoms. Downside to it is 23.976 playback it cannot do with the igpu, so if that is important then the e350 would be the choice or if you choose a case that can fit a half height graphics card then I would still say G620 with a low end nvidia card.
 
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