I'm looking for input about building the ultimate low-power home server.

Some points:

It must be low power! Most mainstream CPUs have a 65w TDP or more. Now add all the other parts, and soon you have a box wasting 100W 24/7 for basic tasks -- no thanks! I like low electricity bills and quietness.

It must be fast enough, but not "fast". As in, I'm not going to use an old P3. But it doesn't have to be a fast CPU either (it's going to sit mostly idle)
Most Athlon64's are 65W+, so are Core 2 Duo's. Intel mobile CPUs are mostly socket P (not many boards for that), and AMD's mobile CPUs Socket S1 (ditto). So I looked at the low end. Cheapest/low end AMD chip is a Sempron LE-1150. TDP is 45W (better, but not so great) and it's still $40. Intel wise, there's a very similar Celeron 430 (35W, almost $50)....

But there's also some boards like the Intel D201GLY2. It has a Celeron 220 on it (still plenty fast). It uses 19W only -- less than most P3's! One version uses passive cooling, the other has a tiny fan. $65 for the whole mini-itx board (small!) with cpu, and everything it needs is onboard (audio, video, 2 SATA, 1 IDE, 2 USB2, serial & parallel, network, etc). It has a PCI slot for future expansion if needed (no need right now, but why not?). The main limit, is the only 1 slot for DDR2, and 1GB of RAM max, but for a box that won't do a whole lot besides NAT (relatively speaking), it should be plenty. There are nicer mATX boards, but they'll cost more (~$50 for board, 40+ for CPU) and they would use more power too.

Add $20 for 1GB of DDR2 533, $15 for a IDE to Compact Flash adapter (already got a couple cards, a 4GB flash and 2.2GB microdrive). So $100 so far. Add a few $ for a small case (nothing fancy, no need for a PSU either, already got a couple spares). Last thing, I might add, is one or two Alfa AWUS036H wifi NICs (USB, 500mW, supports monitor mode, etc) with nice antennas to act as an AP and connect to other networks.

This could run Linux or *BSD, and take care of NAT (with port forwarding)/firewall, DHCP (+PXE), DNS (BIND + OpenDNS), SSH, OpenVPN (my poor WRT54GL doesn't have nearly enough memory for that), a plain old samba domain, handle QoS (for voip), have better wireless overall, share the old laserjet (CUPS), DynDNS client (actually, dns-o-matic) , etc. It also easily could run a LAMP stack, FTP server and squid if one would add a hard drive (you can only fit so much on a 4GB CF card!), as well as have network shares (CIFS, NFS, etc -- even a iSCSI target if you wanted to), backing up files (using SMB), handle large downloads of any type, and such tasks.

If someone has some ideas about the hardware I'm all ears.

I bought one of these around 2 years ago. It has an AMD Geode processor which pulls around 14 watts or less.

http://www.pacificgeek.com/product.asp?c=2...D=48745&P=F

I put a cheap video card in it and a stick of RAM. My wife uses it with Ubuntu 8.04 on it and it works just fine. One day it will become our server. If you can find this machine or any AMD Geode CPU/Mobo combo cheap, it might be a good way to go. The Geode processor is just an old AMD Athlon.

crahak, I've done exactly this and it's been working great. I was even able to run VMware on it, along with a whole bunch of other apps running simultaneously! But now I'll be transferring most of the stuff on it over to my Linksys NSLU2 and using that instead (I'm in university, and moving stuff around every few months is a pain).

Hold on, brb with info .

Okay, here it is, the Intel BOXD945GCLF MINI-ITX 945GC Atom 230 1.6GHZ.

- Better chipset
- 2GB DDR2
- Uses even less, hell the chipset uses more than the CPU it self
- Supports HT, but has a slower FPU than the Celeron (Core2 based).
- Bad thing, like the other one, the little fan on the North Bridge; Just apply a fan at the side of the case that blows over the CPU and Northbridge and you are ready to go.

I´m all ears about the software configuration you are going to use!

Does this look appealing enough?

Punto - From what I've read, the Atom based systems use more power than the D201GLY2 boards - all because of that "better chipset". The i945 chipset draws well over 20W at load, while the D201GLY2 probably sits just above the 20W mark for the entire setup. Besides, for a basic home server, 2GB of RAM is overkill (it's a file/print/routing server mainly).

The only downside to the D201GLY2 (and all the Atom based boards AFAIK) is the 100Mbps onboard ethernet. You'll need to get a gigabit PCI card for higher network speeds if you want that (although for your requirements, that's not really a concern).

Well, the Celeron 220 has a TDP of 19W while the Atom has a TDP of 4W. A 945GC chipset has a total TDP of 22W but it´s unknown to me, thanks to the nice info on the SiS site, how much the 662 chipset TDP is, but more than 7W it sure is...

The TDP doesn't really mean anything other than a maximum design power draw. You'd need to find a site that actually takes one of the boards and measures the system power draw when the system is stressed. SPCR reviewed the D201GLY2 and showed that a complete system (including hard drive and 1x1GB of DDR2-800) would draw about 30W DC at full load. That's ultimately all that matters. The custom built system I linked to draws a total of 40W AC with two 1TB WD GP drives. For a basic home server that also does file serving, I honestly don't know what would be better (without spending 3x as much for a VIA board).

First, thanks to everyone for the input!


Yeah, I did look at Geode stuff, but that stuff doesn't seem to be for sale anywhere around here, so I quickly forgot about it...


Looks interesting. I'll have to do some more comparisons I'm not completely sure where I should draw the line, faster-ish CPU, or more RAM (it doesn't use a whole lot of either, unless I delegate fancier tasks to it) and then there's the power usage, etc.


Similar to what I'm doing (well, I won't be using it for storage I guess, I get CM Stacker cases + SATA RAID cards for that...) And yeah, Gigabit ethernet is a total non-issue here. In fact, I'd probably go for a routerboard instead, but it costs more for slower hardware. And it's more of a uni-tasker, and it has no USB/parallel ports, whereas this can handle way more stuff for sure.


Better power-wise perhaps, but the via stuff I've seen was pretty darn slow by any standard too.

Yes I know that, but it´s just a theoretical indication. But you get the idea where I´m pointing too. I know that the 945GC doesn´t pull 20 watts with normal use, sure if you run Crysis on it , in one of these days I´ll test that mobo with Atom CPU myself here, I´m just waiting for them to come in…

Seemingly there's also the new VIA Nano platform too. The processor is a bit faster (despite some apps making it run slower code for it has a different CPUID string). Power usage for the overall system is very similar (higher at max load, but it's faster too). The boards should be a little nicer too. The sample board I've seen had no parallel port, but 2 more SATA, 2 DIMM slots, 2 ethernet ports (very good since it would be used for network-related tasks like NAT), a PCI-e x16 slot instead of a PCI, a mini-PCI slot, and even a Compact Flash adapter! And it should be priced about the same too. With some luck, one of the boards using the Nano CPU will have onboard Gigabit too (useful in case I want to use it for some of my storage, or run VMware ESXi on it).

On a side note, on the Atom board, the tall chipset/fan combo is actually on their "power-hungry" chipset, not on the CPU! That's a unusual sight to say the least.

Anyways. I was thinking of putting it all in a case like an Antec three hundred (cheap, decent airflow, place to put some hard drives and such if I want to), and likely an Antec Earthwatts 380W PSU (overkill for the job, inexpensive, and also 80plus -- not that I looked to see if it's really 80%+ at very low wattages).

Cool toyz.

By the way, by September we´ll have the dual cored Atom. I wonder if they kept HT in like on the single cored Atom.

Wow, I thought those were due for much later. I'm probably gonna go with a VIA board anyways, as the CPU is already overkill for anything it needs to do, and they the boards are just nicer overall (no need to buy CF adapter separately + use a ugly IDE cable, has PCI-e, etc). That's assuming they can soon be found at my usual shopping places and that they're also decently priced. Unfortunately, ncix only seems to carry Jetway's products as far as mini-ITX goes, and at a ~$150 price average...

anyone know if the atom or the nano boards are any good at streaming video? my old HTPC died and i haven't had time to build a new one. I was looking at building a small box that could play DVDs (Blu-ray possibly?) and stream video from my archive of ripped DVDs off my basement file server through MediaCenter. The atom and nano boards look small enough to do the trick.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001156.html

my home server had more roles to play.. so i didnt go with the slower and less watt mini-itx
and i wanted the try the windows home server os out... so i went with this

cpu

mother board

reason was for the mother board was if the home server didnt work out use it as a media center..
but to find out the cpu has enough power to do both... so it does

the whole system runs at 92 watts load with a 1tb hard drive.. i thought it would be higher
i know this doesnt meet your standards. but i was amazed at the power per watt ratio

Streaming video doesn't take much power at all. Just look at the old XBOX+XBMC. That can handle streaming MPEG4 (ASP like XviD and DivX, not AVC/H.264), and it's an old P3 class 733Mhz CPU in it. DVDs are also a non-issue these days, decoding MPEG2 @ D1 isn't really that demanding, and all video cards nowadays have DirectX Video Acceleration to offload the decoding of that.

As for Blu-Ray, none of these CPUs can handle decoding of that. You'd have to add a video card on it that will do the decoding in hardware (using ATI's UVD or such)