On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 04:19:11PM +0100, Chris G wrote:
I'm coming to the conclusion that the most sensible approach for my 'garage server' will be to build it myself.
A Mini-ITX system would be ideal but the prices are still silly compared with boring old ATX and ATX related systems. In addition I have an ATX case that I can use.
Size isn't an issue, I have two huge garages. Noise isn't an issue, I don't sleep in the garage or watch TV there. :-)
So it would seem that a motherboard with an AMD BE series processor would give me a start for a low power system. Is there any way to decide how power hungry motherboards are? I'm open to alternative recommendations for the processor but Googling about suggests that an AMD BE-2400 or something like it is probably the best low-power/price compromise, so I'm looking for an AM2 motherboard with video and ethernet on board with low power consumption.
The AMD690 boards are supposed to be reasonably low power; I have an Asus M2A-VM HDMI coupled with a BE-2400 and it's a nice box. Unfortunately I don't have a power meter to measure what the usage is.
An ITX system is going to give you much lower consumption at the expense of performance.
J.