Low power server?

[dgingeri]

I'm in need of a fairly low power server board and CPU that can do what I am doing with my current one.

Right now, I have a Core i7 920 running the show on an Asus P6T and 6GB of memory. It has two 4 port network cards, a 8 drive 3ware 9650 raid controller, a PCI Geforce 8400 video card, and a single port USB3 card. I need a total of 3 PCI-e x8 slots and 1 PCI-e x1 slots to handle the hardware. I'm running 8 hard drives in various raid configs (raid 1 or 10, depending on the set) from the raid controller, 2 Vertex 2 SSDs for the OS, and a 3TB USB3 drive for backups. This is all running on Windows Server 2008 R2. I'm running routing, local DNS, DNCP, and both file and printer sharing. I have the 8 ports from the 2 4 port NICs bound together in a virtual switch so I don't have to have a real external switch, and every system in the apartment has a dedicated 1Gb line to the server. Plus, I have a wireless AP.

What I'm looking to do is reduce the power load a little. The current system uses ~200W, with the cable modem, and my UPS won't keep it up for long. It lasts about 20 minutes, but I have had power outages longer than that twice in the last month. I know the hard drives and NICs use a lot of power on their own, but the CPU is still far more than I need. Does anyone know of a lower power motherboard/CPU that has 3 PCI-e x8 slots? lower price would be nice, too.

 

[popatim]

Whats the cpu doing other then serving and storing files?
If nothing try swapping in an i3 but really, 200w for all that isn't bad at all imo.

 

[dgingeri]

Well, I certainly don't need all the CPU power I have, just I/O.

This did get me thinking in a different direction, though. How would an AMD A8 or A6 (first or second gen) work as a server? I've found several FM1 and FM2 motherboards with enough slots (generally 2X x8 and 2X x4 slots) for my uses, plus integrated video. Has anyone tried it?

 

[popatim]

You dont need video in a server at all and the a* series is comparable to an athlonII for processing ability. My server runs an Athlonii x2 240 and serves up files very nicely to the 7 pc's in the house. Mainly because with this type of server its about how you setup your network (multi-path gigabit seperating your heaviest users) and your HDD's ( files with highest bandwidth requirements should be on the fastest hdd system. Ie - videos on a fast raid 10, music & pics on a raid1 or 5...)

I see my error, you're socket 1366 and can't swap in anything cheaper... so yeah pretty much any dual core and up should work fine for you. Just make sure the new bd had server08 drivers available.

 

[dgingeri]

I wound up getting an AMD FX-4100 and an Asrock 970 board for $150. It was actually cheaper than a dual core because I got a $40 discount buying the MB with an FX chip. (I guess Microcenter has some stock they want to get rid of.)

Swapping it in, sitting at idle with the same drives and cards, I save around 90W. My UPS fluctuates between 118W and 109W. (It doesn't have great granularity for wattage monitoring.) the slots are x8, x8, and x4, but that's exactly what I needed. It also has two PCI slots, one of which has my 8400gs video card. It's pretty much perfect for what I wanted. The 4100 has 8MB of L3 cache, making server performance better. I guess the 4130 with less cache would have had lower idle power consumption, but I decided to go with the 4100 instead. This ought to save me about $50/month through the summer, pretty much paying for itself. (Less power consumed means less heat to pump out through the A/C, plus my city triples my electricity bills above a certain level of usage, which I've had to deal with for the last two years.)

Sure, an IB would have been even lower idle power usage, but it would have cost me about $125 more, even for the low end chips. The lowest priced socket 1155 board I found with 3 larger PCIe slots was $184. The lowest priced AM3+ board I could find with 3 larger PCIe slots was $99, with the chip only running $90, and getting a $40 discount with both. It just made sense. Besides, the FX series chips have nearly the same idle power usage as a SB chip, which isn't much higher than the IB, and the 970 chipset has lower power usage than any chipset for socket 1155.