Options for 24/7 server/downloads/VPN/media type pc

spoony77 · 7 Apr 2018 at 10:12

Hi people,
I'm looking at having a low power pc preferably small form factor for running open vpn, server type duties and possibly a bit of Minecraft/emulation.
My options are:-
1. Intel [email protected], 8gb ram, msata
2. i3 [email protected], 4gb ram, regular 2.5" HDD.
3. Reporpose an old desktop for free (probably much less power efficiency and not sff)
What is my best option do you think for the required duties?
Cheers

BongoHunter · 7 Apr 2018 at 12:38

What's your budget?

Any cheap socket 1151 board and Skylake Pentium could work quite well. The Pentiums / Celeron with a “T” suffix are low power (circa 35w TDP) - though the standard ones are a bit cheaper and are about 50w TDP

MATX board would be about £40, CPU £30 - £40 with HSF, 4 GB of 2133 ram can be had for £35ish, TeamGroup SSDs are about £35

Habakkuk · 7 Apr 2018 at 22:16

You could get this done with a few raspberry pi's if you're ok with the speed drop.

I wouldn't want to do it on a single one.

ExoMale · 7 Apr 2018 at 22:26

wouldnt an AM1 do the trick? i spent £52 building mine, okay its a quad sempron, but low power and may do all but minecraft maybe?

decto · 8 Apr 2018 at 10:49

I wouldn't get excited about low wattage CPU's, these are typically clock limited to stay under a power threshold. A standard CPU will complete the task quicker and drop back to idle so overall usage is not that different. At idle there is little to chose. Best option for low power is a dual core with HT.

I have a Dell T20 with Xeon 1225 V3. It idles at 35w so power consumption is less than £1 per week. Would take a long time to pay back the cost of specialist low power components.

Even my older 3ghz quad core Athlon 64 server idles at around 45w though it's in the process of retirement as the mainboard is now around 10 years old. Classic case, originally had a dual core 250u 25w chip in it, it actually used nearer to 50w at idle as the power savings were better on the althon quad (640) if memory serves.

A standard pc will give you more options for storage, you may want to think about redundancy and backups. Depends on how much you data is worth in cash, personal and time to rebuild it all.

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BongoHunter · 8 Apr 2018 at 11:16

^ these are all really good points

Even an AMD TR 1950x idles at 45w

spoony77 · 8 Apr 2018 at 13:57

decto said:
I wouldn't get excited about low wattage CPU's, these are typically clock limited to stay under a power threshold. A standard CPU will complete the task quicker and drop back to idle so overall usage is not that different. At idle there is little to chose. Best option for low power is a dual core with HT.

I have a Dell T20 with Xeon 1225 V3. It idles at 35w so power consumption is less than £1 per week. Would take a long time to pay back the cost of specialist low power components.

Even my older 3ghz quad core Athlon 64 server idles at around 45w though it's in the process of retirement as the mainboard is now around 10 years old. Classic case, originally had a dual core 250u 25w chip in it, it actually used nearer to 50w at idle as the power savings were better on the althon quad (640) if memory serves.

A standard pc will give you more options for storage, you may want to think about redundancy and backups. Depends on how much you data is worth in cash, personal and time to rebuild it all.

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Very interesting thank you.
I have an AMD Athlon 4000+ system sitting around doing nothing with 4gb ram that I will now consider for the job....