Lower powered serer?

B

budec

Gawd
Joined
Jul 10, 2002
Messages
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I'm thinking of using a i5 laptop CPU (with this motherboard) for a low power [usage] server.

I would need another NIC since it's a gateway which would eat up the PCI-E slot. 5 sata ports should be fine.

It should be quite a bit of power (2 cores x 2 HT) for a mere 35W TDP.

Any downside to this? Any suggestions on which of those 3 cpus I should get?
 
I'd recommend going with this motherboard.
It already has dual Intel Gig LAN and comes with 4 SATA3 and 2 SATA3 ports.
CPU wise I'd go with the socket compatibility (G2) and go with the i5-2520M
 
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budec said:
Any downside to this?
Click to expand...

Downside is the cost. You can buy desktop 35W CPUs. Besides costing a lot less, there's no turbo mode. Still, motherboards and CPUs cost about half.
 
MrSmegzabush said:
I cannot say how Highly I recommend one of these. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1555868&highlight=microserver

They go on sale all the time, have quality server build components similar to to a supermicro board, and can handle ECC Memory. They go on sale all the time, got mine last month for $299 f/s w/ 8GB Kingston RAM for free ($80 item)
Click to expand...

Those Servers are awesome. I have mine at home running OpenIndiana as a NAS home server. Damn thing uses so little power, my old LCD monitor I got plugged in uses more power than the MicroServer. This with 4 2TB F4 Drives. (I get around 90MBs transfer across a gig link but I made sure I maxed the ram to 8GB. Working on putting a SSD drive for L2ARC cache)

The only reason I go with the OP setup if I was running VM guests of a really maximize the NAS for SFF. I've only seen one ITX motherboard that dose 32GB of RAM but the processor is rated for 65 watts and only has 2 memory slots. Most other boards are 16GB max or lower.
 
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MrSmegzabush said:
I cannot say how Highly I recommend one of these. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1555868&highlight=microserver

They go on sale all the time, have quality server build components similar to to a supermicro board, and can handle ECC Memory. They go on sale all the time, got mine last month for $299 f/s w/ 8GB Kingston RAM for free ($80 item)
Click to expand...

Heh, I just got mine from a Newegg sale recently, for $249 with free shipping and WHS 2011 bundled with it as a Newegg combo. A bit bigger than the typical WHS boxes, but of course with the optical bay (which may go unused) and with video output, which the typical boxes with WHS preinstalled do not have (headless).

Thanks for the link to that thread. Gonna peruse it at my leisure.
 
MrSmegzabush said:
I cannot say how Highly I recommend one of these. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1555868&highlight=microserver

They go on sale all the time, have quality server build components similar to to a supermicro board, and can handle ECC Memory. They go on sale all the time, got mine last month for $299 f/s w/ 8GB Kingston RAM for free ($80 item)
Click to expand...

only one nic. Does it have expatiation slots?

65 watts seems extremely high for something like this. My friend's first generation Atom is running < 20 watts with 6 drives.

cpu seems weak.

4 drives bays seems low.


ecc is nice.
 
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Zap said:
Downside is the cost. You can buy desktop 35W CPUs. Besides costing a lot less, there's no turbo mode. Still, motherboards and CPUs cost about half.
Click to expand...

The only 35W CPU is either i3; but G1/G2 you can get nice i5s?
 
budec said:
only one nic. Does it have expatiation slots?

65 watts seems extremely high for something like this. My friend's first generation Atom is running < 20 watts with 6 drives.

cpu seems weak.

4 drives bays seems low.


ecc is nice.
Click to expand...
I'm running mine with 4 2TB F4's and it barely goes over 15 watts according to my UPS. (It usually stays around 7-8 watts)
I have a extra low profile NIC in the PCI-E x1 slot. There is also a PCI-E x16 slot being used for my sas card.
 
budec said:
The only 35W CPU is either i3; but G1/G2 you can get nice i5s?
Click to expand...

They are the same, only the i5 will Turbo to higher clocks on occasion. They both are dual core Sandy Bridge CPUs with 3MB cache and Hyperthreading.
 
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