MS Windows Home Server

One Response to “Low Power/Noise CPU’s and Motherboards for WHS”

1. Aaron Says:
   May 14, 2008 at 6:10 pm

   I did a lot of research on this before selecting my component set. One thing that I found interesting is that people don’t generally believe VIA’s clock speeds. Or, maybe put more correctly, 1 GHz in Via terms seems to be accepted as equivalent in performance to about 500 MHz in Intel or AMD terms.

   I looked seriously at the Turion chip, but ended up purchasing a used 1.8GHz mobile Sempron CPU’s on eBay for less than $10. It seemed by far the most cost efficient way to go for my requirements. In fact, I bought two of them in case one fails. This chip supports Cool-n-Quiet (CPU scaling) and has a maximum power consumption of 25 watts.

   Additionally, I had to purchase a motherboard compatible with Mobile Semprons. In this case it was a new $40 MSI K8MM3-V from Newegg (which includes integrated video).

   Hard drives also consume a lot of power, but I think the decision is easy here. Western Digital GreenPower drives consume far less energy than normal HD’s and the cost is about the same. They’re also incredibly quiet.

   The CPU is passively cooled, in fact the entire computer has just a single 60mm case fan. It runs with a PicoPSU high efficiency power supply (no fan, external transformer). I’d highly recommend this PSU for low power computers.

   Net result: 29 watts at idle and the whole thing cost me less than $250 (excluding OS). It goes to about 50 watts under high load, which is rare. This computer is plenty powerful enough for WHS and also serves a few low-load websites and streams media to my Media Center PC. It’s also been 100% stable.