# Going Low Power?



## cpcnw (Mar 20, 2010)

Ive been running FreeBSD / Apache etc on mini-ITX in my office for years but Im now intrested in going even lower power.

Can anyone recommend hardware / project pages etc to get me started?

http://www.tnpi.net/wiki/Soekris_Firewall

This looks interesting. Ive also had a brief look at this ;

http://www.netmedia.com/siteplayer/webserver/index.html

but it looks more like a robotic control project?

Thanks in advance


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## cpcnw (Mar 20, 2010)

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=12064&highlight=soekris

Choice 2 looks interesting ..


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## oliverh (Mar 20, 2010)

There are certain Intel Atom ITX mainboards with a low-power chipset and cpu (Atom270). They have a power consumption of about 10W. Don't mix them with the usual Atom 230 and its 30W+ chipset!

See this board e.g.: http://www.anovotech.com/english/xx-MINI-ITX-945c.php

And the info about the _mobile_ chipset: http://ark.intel.com/chipset.aspx?familyID=35553

A Soekris board has a power consumption of about 7-9W, but an absolute inferior performance compared to the mentioned Atom-ITX-board.


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## Jago (Mar 20, 2010)

Supermicro X7SPA-H (dualcore D510)
Intel D510MO (dualcore D510)
Supermicro X7SPA-L (singlecore D410)

The X7SPA-H (CPU+mobo+RAM+video) draws the following total amounts of power from the wall:

27W - During boot
25W - IDLE at console
28-30W - running memtest

The X7SPA-L probably a bit less, but obviously dualcore vs singlecore can have a big performance impact. The Intel board is obviously the cheapest solution by far, but it is also noticably more limited in features compared to the Supermicro ones.


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## oliverh (Mar 20, 2010)

But even the new single and dualcores have a 'high' power-consumption with 25W (btw. I'm measuring 20-22W idle with my Intel D510MO) compared to a system with Atom 270 and an idle power consumption of about 9-10W. For a small mail server, even Soekris is more than enough, for Apache etc. a single core Atom is sufficient. I'm using the dualcore as htpc (plus nVidia 8400GS for mplayer/vdpau) and the single core D410 (Intel desktop board) as el-cheapo server.


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