# Help me assemble cheap server



## graudeejs (Nov 24, 2009)

Hello!

You all know me as happy desktop FreeBSD user.
Hopefully that is about to change. I have idea to start my own company.
I want to create server that will be running FreeBSD-8 jails
In jails I will have mail server, web server, ftp server (maybe), Proxy (most likely). Server will be running on ZFS

The problem is that I have very limited resources... Frankly I have no cash at all, I will lend it, but that's not the point.

I've opened local PC shop and assembled something that I think would be good hardware to start.
If I'd decide to buy it today it would cost me 378.57Ls which is about $800.

I tried to pick hardware that was cheap on one hand, and easily upgradable on other hand. Also I tried to pick hardware which consume less power.

So here is what I Picked:
*CPU*: Athlon II X3 400E 2,2GHz 1,5MB sAM3 AMD *AD400EHDGIBOX* (45W) (3 yyear warranty)
*MB*: Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P (3 year warranty)
*RAM*: 4GB DDR3 1333MHz ECC Kit of 2 Crucial CT2KIT12864BA1339 (total 8GB) (3 yearr warranty)
*HDD*: 3x 3,5" SATA 1000GB 5900rpm 32MB Barracuda LP Seagate ST31000520AS (3 yearr warranty)
*PSU*: 350W ATX Realpower RP-350 Ultron 53590
+ fans and case.

What do you think about my selection? What can you recommend?


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## Artefact2 (Nov 24, 2009)

Well, I'd recommend you use jails, pubkey+password ssh identifcation, gmirror and, also, invest in an UPS (with apcupsd)  

Also, what will be the (estimated) load of the machine ? You might buy cheap occasion hardware that perfectly fits a mail/ftp server.


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## Artefact2 (Nov 24, 2009)

If you're paranoid, you might want to use GELI and encypt everything (root, swap and your other partitions).

(Sorry for double post, can't edit :| )


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## graudeejs (Nov 24, 2009)

About load: I have no idea, but I don't think it will be any high...., especially for first 6 months
about the paranoia and everything... I know that....

yes to UPS, but that's later, when things start moving 

What can you tell me about my selected hardware.....


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## SirDice (Nov 24, 2009)

Since you'll be running several services I would pick a dual or quad core. 

Also note that you may want to separate the OS and your data. It's best to keep the data on RAID5 in case one of the drives dies. You need to think of a backup strategy too (something everybody forgets until it's too late).


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## Artefact2 (Nov 24, 2009)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Since you'll be running several services I would pick a dual or quad core.



The CPU he selected already has three cores. It's just an AMD one.


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## graudeejs (Nov 24, 2009)

I will use ZFS raid.... will read more about specific stuff.....

For backups I will use my desktop PC. For start server will stay in house.
Also I think I may use geli encryption (yup, I have paranoia)

Is triple core any worse than dual core (shouldn't be)? I did look at quad core, but it was already 65W, so I decided to pick 3x core


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## graudeejs (Nov 24, 2009)

One thing I was wondering, does motherboard have to support EEC ram, for it to work?
I didn't saw any notice that this MB support it.


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## jalla (Nov 24, 2009)

Unless you really need the space, I'd think again about those disks. Perhaps put some ekstra $$ in a bigger PSU and buy 3-5 smaller, faster disks.


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## Artefact2 (Nov 24, 2009)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> One thing I was wondering, does motherboard have to support EEC ram, for it to work?
> I didn't saw any notice that this MB support it.



Yes. And motherboards supporting ECC ram are usually much more expansive.

And according to this, the motherboard you choose won't support ECC ram.


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## graudeejs (Nov 24, 2009)

jalla said:
			
		

> Unless you really need the space, I'd think again about those disks. Perhaps put some ekstra $$ in a bigger PSU and buy 3-5 smaller, faster disks.



I think it's good price. Anyway i need at least 3 HDD's to build raid, I figured, that for now they can be 3, and later I can add 3 more, because MB can support 6 SATA2 drives 

Disks 3,5" SATA 500GB 7200rpm 16MB Barracuda 7200.12 Seagate ST3500418AS costs 30.96Ls/pcs (65.26$/pcs) => 1GB/0.13052$

When Disks which I picked cost 48.07Ls/pcs (101.33$/pcs) => 1GB/0.10133$

And Disks I picked have double cache compered to these 500GB disks. And since I'm going to use ZFS I think big Cache is what i need.

Please correct me If I'm wrong....


Also I may open up some hosting... and with raid with 3x1TB hdd I will have 1 to 1.5 TB available.... on one hand it's a lot, on other hand.... information technology evolve every day, and we use more and more data....

sheeesh..... This is hard... when you have to pick between hardware you want, and hardware you can afford


about ram: Searching for sollutions


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## Artefact2 (Nov 24, 2009)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> about ram: Searching for sollutions



Don't use ECC ? It's not mandatory if you don't want an absolute 100% uptime.

I agree with you about the HDDs : they have a good capacity/price ratio, though I'd rather use UFS2+SoftUpdates+gmirror on it (more mature thus less risks for a production environment).


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## graudeejs (Nov 24, 2009)

I'm using geli+zfs for months now... I haven't lost a single bit since then.
And I had some nasty power failures....

Even yesterday, when I was compiling OOO packages my PC froze because of strong power flickering, and I have ups...

Still zfs works just fine

Frankly, ever since I started using ZFS life is boring..... You won't understand it until you try it

So as for FS, I'm 100% confident in zfs


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## graudeejs (Nov 24, 2009)

Artefact2 said:
			
		

> Don't use ECC ? It's not mandatory if you don't want an absolute 100% uptime.



Ye I was looking for motherboard with EEC support... but didn't find anything....
Anyway, this ram was very cheap.... so I just say with it.
Maybe if I buy another box (one day) it'll have EEC support, and I'll just swap rams


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## graudeejs (Nov 24, 2009)

I'm also thinking, If I add another 22Ls (~46$) I can get Athlon II *X4* 600E 2,2GHz *2MB* sAM3 AMD AD600EHDGIBOX (45w)


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## jalla (Nov 24, 2009)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> I'm also thinking, If I add another 22Ls (~46$) I can get Athlon II *X4* 600E 2,2GHz *2MB* sAM3 AMD AD600EHDGIBOX (45w)



If you want performance I still think you should spend some extra money on disks. The difference between 5900 and 7200rpm disks is significant, & like in any raid system, you want to maximize the number of spindles if you want maximum performance.

When it comes to price/Gb I guess 1-to-1.5 Gb disks is currently the sweet spot. However, if you need ~2Tb of usable space and you want decent performance, I would definately choose 5x500Gb at 7200rpm over 3x1Tb at 5900.


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## graudeejs (Nov 24, 2009)

Agree


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## graudeejs (Nov 24, 2009)

Do you think 350W PSU will handle this?

and what if I use 6x500GB 7200rpm disks?


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## graudeejs (Nov 24, 2009)

On the disks, yes, 7200rpm vs 5900rpm has sustained data transfer rate 120MB/s vs 95MB/s


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## graudeejs (Nov 24, 2009)

It just strike me....
I can buy 3x 500GB HDD's +1 64GB SSD
Summery:

*CPU*: Athlon II X3 400E 2,2GHz 1,5MB sAM3 AMD *AD400EHDGIBOX* (45W) (3 yyear warranty)
*MB*: Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P (3 year warranty)
*RAM*: 4GB DDR3 1333MHz ECC Kit of 2 Crucial CT2KIT12864BA1339 (total 8GB) (3 yearr warranty)
[red]*HDD*[/red]: 3x 3,5" SATA 500GB 7200rpm 16MB Barracuda 7200.12 Seagate ST3500418AS (3 year warranty)
[red]*SSD*[/red]: 2,5'' SATA 64GB SSDNow V-Series Kingston SNV125-S2BN 64GB (3 year warranty)
*PSU*: 350W ATX Realpower RP-350 Ultron 53590
+ fans and case.

This setup will cost: 408.11 Ls (862.63$)..... oh and I wanted Cheap hardware....

It's 100Ls more than I wanted before I started to calculate expenses


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## expl (Nov 25, 2009)

What file system setup with ZFS/UFS are you planning to have?
SSDs are mostly used to store complicated or very high internal bandwidth databases, its kinda pointless to keep anything else there for non-local use.


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## graudeejs (Nov 25, 2009)

No UFS.....
SSD could be used for zfs cache, it will speed up zfs greatly

It's pretty much optional, I can buy and insert it at any given moment, If I need to improve performace


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## mfaridi (Nov 25, 2009)

I think 350 watt power in not enough for you 
because you use many HDD and they use many power it is better you but powerful power , you wanbt make server and this system is always is ON , you know low power maybe damage your system and you loose many thing like hardware and ...


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## jem (Nov 25, 2009)

I recently spent a lot of time speccing up new PC hardware to form the basis of a  FreeBSD/ZFS file server.

I too was looking for ECC memory initially, as a common consideration in ZFS articles was something like "ZFS itself may be exceptional at maintaining data integrity on disk, but what if the data gets corrupted before it gets to disks by a cosmic ray flipping a bit in RAM?".

What I found though was that in these days of memory controllers being integral in the CPU, not only does the motherboard have to support ECC but the processor does too.  This usually means switching to the server-grade CPU products like Xeon.  By the time you've bought your more expensive RAM, motherboard and CPU, prices have jumped up considerably.

In the end I opted for normal RAM as my fileserver would only be holding digital media ripped from the originals and it would only be written to rarely.


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## mk (Nov 25, 2009)

this is from local hp representative, this is dl385, two way server. ram is little bit slow - 400mhz. but still a good start.
i doubt that they ship out of country but you can try to find similar configuration.

```
Part NO:	391110-421
cpu:	           Dual-core AMD 265 (1.8 GHz) Opteron Processor
chipset:	   AMD Opteron 8000 series Chipset
installed ram:	   1024
max ram:	   32 GB RAM
Max hdd, type:	   Up to six (6) 1" Ultra320 SCSI Hot Plug Hard Drives
network controler: NC7782 Dual Port PCI-X Gigabit Server Adapter (embedded)
expansition slots: 2x 64-bit/100MHz PCI-X, 3.3 Volt; 1x 64-bit/133MHz PCI-X, 3.3 Volt
psu:	           575 Watt, CE Mark CompliantOptional Hot Plug AC; Redundant Power Supply
internal ports:	   Serial - 1; Pointing Device (Mouse) - 1; Graphics - 1; Keyboard - 1;
 Network RJ-45 - 3 (1 for iLO); USB - 3 (1 front, 2 back)
optical drive:	   24x IDE CD-ROM
form factor:	   Rack (2U)
dimention and weight:	44.54 x 66.07 x 8.59 cm, 20.41 kg
price:	331 EUR
```
P.S. all typos are mine!


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## vivek (Nov 25, 2009)

Do you've any plan to make money (you said something about business) out of it or just hobby kind of server setup? If I were you I will start with basic hardware with RAID1 (trust me server do not need lots of hard disk space). Make sure motherboard support 4 hard disks (2 SATA connections) and 4/8GB RAM. This way you can upgrade RAM, hard disk and other stuff as per your requirement later on. 

My first FreeBSD server was lowend Celeron based with 2x18G scsi hard drives and 1GB RAM. It hosted around 40-50 websites for my various client including mail server with shared 10Mbps port. 

HTH


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## graudeejs (Nov 25, 2009)

ok, here's my (so far) final setup



> HDD: _3x_ 3,5" SATA 500GB 7200rpm 16MB Barracuda 7200.12 Seagate ST3500418AS - $197.16
> CPU: Athlon II X3 400E 2,2GHz 1,5MB sAM3 AMD AD400EHDGIBOX - $136.82
> Motherboard: sAM3 AMD 790FX SB750 ATX Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P - $153.50
> RAM: 4GB DDR3 1333MHz ECC Kit of 2 Crucial CT2KIT12864BA1339 - $66.44
> ...


+UPS

Total $760.99 (506.84Eur), from which $132.32 is tax


Yes, I have plan how to make money...
Probably the biggest problem will be taxes and everything related.
In Latvia we have HUGE mess right now.


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## vivek (Nov 25, 2009)

Looks good to me. This baby can server 2-5 million page views per month


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## graudeejs (Nov 25, 2009)

I hope your government will accept new law, about needed capital to start company.

Currently to start company you need 2000Ls (4 245.38USD), if they accept new law, I will only need 100Ls (212.26USD)

can you feel the difference? No wonder our economy is currently ****ed


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## mike_s (Dec 5, 2009)

excuse me for bumping in and giving my two cents ;-) 

- Your motherboard supports 2xPCIe x16 which is good for crossfire video cards setups (gamer related) , something you will not need on your server. More over, to reduce power consumption your server will be headless, i.e. no graphics card installed. 
- The motherboard series do not support ECC buffered RAM
- The thermaltake psu has 2xSATA 4xMolex and the reviews I read didn't convince me.
- Your case has a PSU pre-installed?


My choice:

Motherboard: 
GigaByte GA-MA770T-UD3P 88.90â‚¬ 
(same specs as yours only 1 PCIex16)

Memory: 
4 GB DDR3-1333 Kit OCZ3P1333LV4GK, Platinum Edition 93.90â‚¬
(low voltage, good latencies (CL7 7-7-20) )

PSU: 
Cooler Master Real Power M520 69.90â‚¬
(Cables are modular, you use what you need, no spaghetti of cables in your case, 8xSATA or 10xMolex )

CASE: 
Cooler Master CM690 (3 pre-installed 120mm fans) 64.90â‚¬
(Good reviews! Recommended in many cases. ) 

Boxed cpu fan will be sufficient. Especially with the case's airflow (CM690) . A 'special' cpu cooler implies you want to overclock your cpu. 

Don't buy/install HDD fans! This is one of those products nobody should install. (A few yours ago, when I was still repairing pc's, some customer had those HDD fan installed and he complained his pc was 'dead'. The bottom of the HDD (circuit board) was covered in dust. It is more important that your case intake blows over your HDs. (This is for desktop cases, storage servers mostly blow dissipated heat out of the case but their airflow is very different compared with desktop cases. ) 
Leave a space between your HDs when you assemble. For example the CM690 has 5 HD bays (top12345bottom -> X2X4X where X is a disk)

Please, check the HCG as well for your chipset/controller support. Sometimes, new motherboards are to new for FreeBSD.
I don't have good experiences with onboard realtek NICs, I prefer 3Com/Intel NICs with FreeBSD.

ZFS dedup and compression


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## rhyous (Dec 17, 2009)

Don't go with a single 5900 RPM drive.  You need faster if it is all running on one drive.  You also probably multiple drives if you ever start getting the server used.

You may want at least a 400w power supply.


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Dec 18, 2009)

Just try to buy second hand servers of 2 to 3 years old. Try to focus on the "better" brands. I have currently four second hand HP DL servers (three DL360G4 and one DL320G5) and they all work excellent on FreeBSD. A DL320G5 in second hand is very affordable and is still a pretty fast machine on the condition there is a Xeon inside. Power consumption of this dual core CPU is 65W.


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## mike_s (Dec 31, 2009)

65W tdp 
CPU is one thing (okay the xeons have speedstep), motherboard, harddisks (scsi, 10k or 15k rpm), and so on.
In the end, a server consumes more power which reflects on your electricity bill. Then, a disk or fan dies and because of the second hand nature, no rma or guarantee contracts. Replacement parts are not cheap even when they are second hand. 
Although I have as well good experiences with HP, SUN and supermicro servers as long as they are not too exotic or the latest series.

An example calculation:
1 kWh = 0.15 euro cent (example)
power consumption system under full load 250 Watt (example)
365 days * 24 h = 8760 h * 250 W = 2190 kWh * 0.15 euro/kWh = 328.5 euro a year. 
Anyway, I would stick to Killasmurf86 config as it is. 
Maybe I would use other harddisks (Western Digital GP, has rpm throttling) . I just bought 12TB of those 2TB WD GP disks especially for the rpm throttling and the native 4KB blocks.

Sorry for digging up this thread.


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## graudeejs (Jan 10, 2010)

Now I got cash.... in 2-3 days I will order this [in 2 days MB will be available for ordering]. Since I started this thread some hardware was not available no more... some new hardware appeared etc....

Today I created new list of what I will order based on knowledge gained in this thread:
*MotherBoard*: Gigabyte - GA-790XTA-UD4
*CPU*: AMD Athlon II X4 2.2GHz 45W - AD600EHDGIBOX
*RAM*: OCZ 2x2Gb, 1333Mhz, CL7 - OCZ3P1333LV4GK
*HDD*: 3x WD Caviar GP, 640GB, SATA II, 32MB - WD6400AADS
*PSU*: Giga Byte 550W 12V - GE-P450P-C2
*CASE*: 24ZX6-BPD100-00R
+ 12mm fan

Total cost: *430.78 LVL* = *890.11 USD*

There still time to modify this setup if someone has better thoughts.


P.S.
What do you think about this RAM? I thinking to either pick this OCZ ram wich has CL7 or Klingston with CL9. I do trust Kingston more for some reason, but CL7 makes me wanna buy OCZ. Price difference is insignificant

EDIT:
ah... and I'll need new USB flash to boot this baby 

EDIT, or I could pick:
OCZ Obsidian, 4Gb 1600Mhz, Kit of 2 - OCZ3OB1600LV4GK - as i understand from Mobo site i need to plug then in 3rd and 4th DIMM slot....

hmm I'm bit confused, does MOBO support 1600MHz or not....


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Jan 11, 2010)

Kingston is definitely one of the better memory manufacturers. I think however you should go for a system with ECC memory considering you will use it has a server.

I saw somewhere this second hand config for sale:

"HP Proliant DL360 G5 Dual Quad Core Performance Model 
model:435944-421 
- 2 Quad-Core IntelÂ® XeonÂ® Processor L5430 (2.66 GHz, 50 Watts, 1333 FSB) 
- 12GB ECC ram 
- 5 x 146GB sas disken 10K rpm hot swappable 
- P400i raid controller 
- ilo 
- redundante 700W hot swap voeding 
- 2x gigabit netwerk 
- slim dvd rom  "

They didn't set a price, except that they would not sell it under 1000 euro. The config looks impressive: the number of disks, the amount of RAM, redundant PSU and last but not least two low power quad core Xeons. New price of a machine like this will most likely be close to 5000 euro.


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## graudeejs (Jan 11, 2010)

Here are some cheep servers locally for sale{I don't know if they are still for sale, I did email, to find out}

http://www.ss.lv/msg/lv/electronics/computers/computers/severs/giddi.html - 516.32 USD
http://www.ss.lv/msg/lv/electronics/computers/computers/severs/hjlje.html - 570.01 USD
http://www.ss.lv/msg/lv/electronics/computers/computers/severs/mxlkp.html - 392.4 USD

What do you think?

EEC - no It's expensive to have it..... for starters I want a Cheap server.
And the biggest question is NEW vs USED


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## gkontos (Jan 11, 2010)

You said that you plan to do this business from home. Just curious, do you have the necessary bandwidth, ups, etc for that ? 
Also do you plan on utilizing a firewall to separate it from your internal network?

Regards,

George


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## graudeejs (Jan 11, 2010)

Bandwidth is OK. I'll buy UPS... 
and I will simply buy additional IP for 3$, so it will be completely separate from my home IP


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Jan 11, 2010)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> Here are some cheep servers locally for sale{I don't know if they are still for sale, I did email, to find out}
> 
> http://www.ss.lv/msg/lv/electronics/computers/computers/severs/giddi.html - 516.32 USD
> http://www.ss.lv/msg/lv/electronics/computers/computers/severs/hjlje.html - 570.01 USD
> ...



Are those Chenbro servers (the first and the third). I had one but sold it because too noisy and I had to upgrade the BIOS since FreeBSD suddenly hung for no reason. I remember I did this with FreeDOS. 
In fact a few weeks ago I sold a custom build server: Tyan motherboard S2892 (two Opteron 275 CPUs, 4GB, two 74GB + two 250GB HDs) in a Chenbro case for 250 Euro. FreeBSD worked fine on this one.
The Dell machine, are those Xeon P4? 
Honestly all those machines are little bit outdated and 'too slow' for today. Perhaps a single socket dual or quad core HP (like DL320G5 or G6) or Dell should do the job.

Don't be bothered by UPS systems. That market completely collapsed. I got mine from a scrape yard and it still works fine.
The only thing I always notice (as an engineer) is that many IT people are unreasonable about a UPS. Some want to have it to deliver power for more than half an hour. I simply say to those people, work a little bit harder or add a generator.


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## graudeejs (Jan 11, 2010)

Sorry, I don't know... I know as much as you about these servers.


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## vermaden (Jan 11, 2010)

To make that setup cheap (and get lower power consumption), I would get these:
*CPU:* Intel e6320/e6420/e6550/e5200 (lowest power consumption)
*MTH:* Intel G33/Q35 (lowest power consumption) [includes also a Intel 10/100/1000 NIC]
*RAM:* ramdom stock DDR2 800MHz 2 x 2GB
*SSD:* random cheap 16GB SATA for base system
*HDD:* 3 x 1.5TB WD15EADS (ZFS RAIDZ) (or 3 x 1TB WD10EADS for lower power consumption)
*PSU:* Antec EarthWatts 380W (efficency about 85% on middle load)
psu: (or any other low vattage psu with high efficency)
*$$$:* $550 - $690


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Jan 11, 2010)

vermaden said:
			
		

> To make that setup cheap (and get lower power consumption), I would get these:
> *CPU:* Intel e6320/e6420/e6550/e5200 (lowest power consumption)
> *MTH:* Intel G33/Q35 (lowest power consumption) [includes also a Intel 10/100/1000 NIC]
> *RAM:* ramdom stock DDR2 800MHz 2 x 2GB
> ...



You're pointing to a couple of excellent price/performance CPU's
like E5200. I built a PC with this CPU for a friend who didn't want to spend too much. Despite its slower 800MHz FSB, I remember one core was faster than a core of my Q6600.
Compare the E5200 to the E8400 you will pay more than double the price for something which is maybe max 50 percent faster.

I often take a look at:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net

I know those statistics are somewhat biased since they were all done on Windows and all different types memories, motherboards, etc...
If you add a price to each device, it's helpful to compare CPUs of the same brand.


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## graudeejs (Jan 12, 2010)

Ok I ordered my setup. And I will get This shiny little toy on Friday 
woooooooot


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