> So for my systems I've put together the following:
>
> My existing box is based on an old Celeron 533 with 512M RAM and twin
> 250G Seagate HDs setup with a RAID mirror. When I put my power monitor
> on it it reported a peak of around 60W and settled back to around 47W as
> a typical operating figure. A quick estimate of cost gave me a ball park
> running cost of around the £40 per year mark give or take.
>
> The new box is based on a nice Tyan motherboard (with serial console
> access to the BIOS) with twin Athlon MP 2000+ processors and 1G RAM. For
> testing there was only a single 40G Seagate HD in. Now when I put the
> power monitor on that it peaked at around 180W and settled back down to
> around the 172W mark give or take. At which point I picked myself up off
> the floor and did my calculations. This came it at around the £140 per
> year mark for electricity usage - eeek!!
Once question would be: "did I have all the power saving features switched
on?". I know that my Athlon machine came pre-configured with the SpeedStep
features switched off. Turning them on made a big difference to the noise
output as it spins fans down and turns down the clock speed. (no idea how
much difference it made to power consumption, I don't have a tester).
I switched this on for linux on my new laptop and the laptop with all low
power features enabled only draws something like 19watts, and that is for
a Intel Dual Core T7700 with a top speed of 2ghz, (drops down to 800mhz I
believe).
The other question is, how much processing power do you need? For small
fileserver type applications you won't need much, but apps tend to be
getting more and more inefficient if you want to run a webserver.
I run a media PC at home, and a AMD Duron server, both with power saving
enable to keep the costs down, and I don't have a huge electricity bill :)
If you don't need much grunt, it would be worth considering one of these,
which are on sale now / soon:
http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/Motherboards.html
The atom CPU claims to be very low power, and I found one review of a
setup only drawing 40W:
http://sg.vr-zone.com/?i=5721
But no idea if it will have enough power to do the job :)
