dsdreamer;295254 Wrote: > I have been enjoying my pair of SB3s for quite some time without > thinking about the energy costs (financial and environmental) of > running an old PC 24/7/365 to act as a dedicated server. Now I want to > do something about it, and wondered what options people have employed > successfully. > > Some ideas of my own, that I have implemented or tried to: > 1) Underclock the PC CPU and Memory in the BIOS > 2) Remove unwanted hardware such as graphics accelerators (since the > machine is running headless) > 3) Auto standby after some hours of inactivity > > I would really like to combine #3 with Wakeup on LAN, but I couldn't > get that to work (yet). Does the the firmware that comes with SC 7.0 > still support the WOL magic packet? > > Do other people have different ideas that they could share here? It may > help a few people and save a few mega Joules of energy aggregated over > the SD community :-) > > --Dsdreamer
On newer CPUs, underclock may not give you saving because the CPU will underclock itself during idle anyway. Undervolt will save you a lot more. How much power saving depends on how old your CPU is. Older CPUs without "speed step" or "cool & quiet" will burn you a lot more energy. My old Athlon XP 3000 burns 102W during idle. My Athlon x2 3600 only burns 45W when idle and 39W after undervolting. WOL will save you the most energy and is easy to do. Most computers only use 1-5W during S3 sleep and wake up time is typically 20s (of which 15s was waiting for hard drive to spin up). If you are really concerned about power saving but want to maintain performance, forget about desktop boxes. Get a cheap old notebook with something like a Pentium M. While I spent hours trimmed and tuned my desktop server down to the impressive 39W, my Gateway notebook used only 12W after 5min of tweaking. If you want to put together a new SFF box, wait for the upcoming (May) Intel Atom CPU and Centrino 2 chipset. Expectation are that they are really good on performanc/power ratio. -- Honva ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Honva's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=14948 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=46780 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
