Low power SSF - Is this possible?

Amp34 · 14 Oct 2011 at 15:02

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?

Amp34 · 14 Oct 2011 at 15:46

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?

Amp34 · 14 Oct 2011 at 16:08

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 · 14 Oct 2011 at 16:47

Ok so after all of that what about the AMD E-350? http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-330-GI&groupid=701&catid=1903&subcat=1949

What's it like? fast enough to run windows 7 without any issue I assume?

The above board seems fine for my needs and after adding a couple of GB of RAM, a HDD and a cheapo case it would be cheap and low cost to run. Anything else I would need?