** Stephen Rowles <stephen@???> [2008-05-20 11:26]:
> > 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).
As far as I could in the BIOS yes, although I haven't done a fresh OS
install to test yet. There seemed to be very little in the way of
configuration options in the BIOS sadly, just little morethan ACPI
enable/disable and standby and suspend timeouts. The boards are Tyan
S2466 Tiger MPX and have better than usual manuals, but still pretty
thin on the BIOS descriptions - more a case of if you don't already know
you need to set the option then they won't add any info to enlighten
you!
> 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.
Not a huge amount, although it appears, now I'm down to a single server
handling web/mail/dns/dhcp/proxy/spam/etc. a bit more than an old
Celeron 533 can deliver. Clearly the new boxes have more than enough,
but, although I've considered virtualisation, 3 separate boxes seem a
better option. Two internal ones to share the load and provide fall back
and data backup between the two (virtualisation here would kill both at
the same time should there be a failure!), and one DMZ box processing
the incoming mail and providing some extranet/internet functionality
(security is the barrier to virtualisation here, although I've not read
up on the risks of a compromise excalating the the host OS and/or
between VMs - clearly care would need to be taken to isolate the
internal VMs and external one and prevent each from any risk form the
NIC used by the other).
> 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 :)
That looks interesting. Not sure if it would fit in a standard ATX case
to save me purchasing a new one, and I'd have to look into whether to
buy a whole new set of SATA HDs or if I could fit one of my PCI ATA
cards - the 1>2 PCI riser looks interesting. Worth following up on, and
not a bad price by the looks of it. Interesting that it is the north
bridge chip that needs the fan cooling and not the CPU!
** end quote [Stephen Rowles]
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