whats more energy efficient??

knowlesy

knowlesy

knowlesy

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so what would be more energy efficient ? (will be constantly on for a home server)

pent 4 1.6ghz
2gig ram (ive got a spare 1 gig but not sure if itll work with)
60 gig hdd
80 gig hdd
i think its 400 watt psu
1x cd bays
3 usb attachments
intergrated graphics

vs

amd 64bit 939 1.8ghz
3gig ram tried and tested
60 gig
80 gig
external graphics agp (need to buy a cheap one)
1x cd bay
3 usb attachments


2 of the usb attachments are externals Id love them to be internals do you rekkon i shud crack open the lovley mybook enclosure for it or not ? either way I need to buy a new internal soon!

it will be running server 2003
 
What sort of P4 is it? I would google the TDP (thermal design power) of it and the AMD and then compare the two.

If the P4's mobo has an intel chipset, I would personal use that over the amd though.
 
Thats a big vague on the information... What steppings are the Athlon and P4 CPUs...

Here's some reference lists. As has already stated TDP is a bit vague and is measured differently by AMD and Intel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_4_microprocessors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Athlon_64_microprocessors

It's going to be a close match. The Athlon-64 has lower chipset power requirements (integrated memory controller) but may lose out due to the requirement to use a discrete GPU (even if its really low end). Can you mock up the systems and run them with one of those digital power consumption meters hooked up (while running your expected server process loading on the system). Wall socket power consumption is what you care about at the end of the day after all...

In the general the Athlon-64 has a much better architecture than the P4. I really noticed a speed difference between my older P4 system @ 3.6Ghz (Prescott) and my current 2x Opteron @2.0Ghz (single core). Clock for clock the single-core Athlon-64 is much faster than a P4. The P4 (aka Netburst) architectures used very deep integer pipelines which lead to long latencies with mis-predicted branch instructions, etc.

Personally I would always prefer a GNU/Linux or BSD based OS to use as a server. There are specialist distros for doing this. MS just hacked on a few extras to a desktop OS to make Windows Server 2003. Windows still wins hands down for a multimedia/gaming desktop of course.

Bob
 
knowlesy said:
id of prefred linux but its to much hassle for a home media server for me :(
Click to expand...

Uhmmm I can totally see where you are coming from... I do come from a Comp Sci (BEng.) background as well (just get that out in the open).

In my experience it used to take hours of d***ing about with Samba to setup a Windows file sharing network. With more recent releases of Ubuntu the client works "out of the box" and the server doesn't take long to setup.
Hardware support in the Linux kernel has also leapt forwards over the past 4 years.

Like I said for the "newbie" there are distros that are designed specially to use as home servers. These will allow you to configure them via a web interface (as well as locally), etc. Just head over to:
Distro Watch
You can just download them, burn them, install them (/live CD) and see if they work. That doesn't take long with broadband!!

I am not GNU/Linux fanboi and run Windows XP x64 as my main OS. I do have dual boot with Ubuntu "Jaunty Jackalope" 9.04 beta (AMD64). This is a really nice desktop OS (looking forward to the final release this month)!!

Bob
 
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