'Green' Intel Atom based server

[motobarsteward]

All up, my current server draws around 120 to 180W. Hibernated does not happen reliably.

All in all, the system is costing around £150 per year to run.

So, I am looking at building a new server.

Has anyone built a server using the new dual-core Atom processors?

I'm looking at: -

http://uk.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID...PkC&templete=2

I will be plugging in a couple of Hauppauge HVR4000 capture cards into a PCI riser.

[motobarsteward]

Just to add a bit more to this. I've Googled a bit but have not found anyone with actual experience of running such a system.

I should also add that this is a headless server and will not be used as a client.

Also, on these cards, you can get around the lack of PCI ports with risers. Google found the following: -

http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11480

[starfire]

Probably doesn't help but I tried with a new Sempron 140 (single core, not unlocked) not expecting to notice any difference on my HD100 clients, but they did noticably slow down navigating menus and a lot more of the rotating circle wait appeared - went back to my dual core 3600 pulling around 70-80watts.

[Fuzzy]

While I haven't used the Aton330 in a sage sever, I do have one setup in my truck (Intel D945GCLF2). It is actually quite a quick little processor for everyday functions. It should have no problesm whatsoever running a sage server. That said, i think the key advantages of the Atom330 are the size. Therefore, it may make more sense for an 'in-room' htpc, where you could base it on a tiny mini-itx board, than it would in a hidden headless server. In all honesty, if you are just running a headless sage server, I don't think you'd have a problem with ANY processor currently on the market. I'd look more at just getting a motherboard that suits your needs, and getting on of the cheaper processors that would work with that board.

[brewston]

I've got this :

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/deskt...il-t2e-sp13000

as my server (dont worry i didnt pay that much !) and whilst the menus are slower than my old Athlon XP its still usable and since its in my lounge I like the fact that its completely silent. I assume it consumes less power than most conventional servers but I've not checked. I'm also running headless to HD200 (which actually sits on top of it)

I tried installing a dual PCI riser like the one you linked to but I had problems but it could have been lack of power. I've been thinking of getting a newer machine from Tranquil with a dual core Atom as they seem like very well put together...

[DMT]

I just finished building a new SageTV / WHS based on the Intel Desktop Board D510MO. This turned out to be a great WHS board. I have 2x HD-PVR's for capture and view on 2x HD200's.

The build was not the easiest nor the cheapest but it was great fun. I housed everything in a Chenbro ES34069. The challenging part was making everything fit / cable management because I needed a Promise 4-port SATA controller AND a 1394 card for STB firewire channel change. I found a flexible dual PCI riser that fit my needs. There is also a slim blu-ray drive and no room to spare! In the end everything fit beautifully, looks good, runs cool and quiet (under volt the fans a little).

Power draw is ~55 watts idle at the 110 volt outlet w/5 HDD's. The CPU never breaks a sweat, usually running <5% recording and serving up files from 5.5TB of storage (1x 500GB 2.5" OS, 1x 2TB WD Green, 3x 1TB Seagate Barracuda. I also run My Movies, store / serve documents, pics, iTunes and backup all my computers.

This replaces my old low power server (G31 chipset / E2200 processor), knocks off about 45 watts and performance is the same. I don't comskip or transcode.

Hope this helps.

Dave

[SWKerr]

You will get some power savings but probably not as much as you are thinking. I suspect a lot of your power draw is from other components. You are giving up a lot with a Atom based system and I'll bet the overall power savings will be a lot less than you think compared to a new i3 based system.

Interesting TomsHardware artivle on low power i5
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...e-pc,2551.html

Also if you are running headless then a full size case you can easily add hard drives and cards to just makes sense.

[DMT]

[QUOTE=SWKerr;414626]You will get some power savings but probably not as much as you are thinking. I suspect a lot of your power draw is from other components. You are giving up a lot with a Atom based system and I'll bet the overall power savings will be a lot less than you think compared to a new i3 based system.

I agree. Many Atom boards are deceiving, inefficient chipsets. Pine Trail is different but not perfect. The ITX advantage is size, possibly less heat if that is what you are after. That being said if I were building mATX, the i3 would be top of my list.

Other components can up the power consumption fast, like ~8 watts at the wall for a 1TB 7200 RPM drive in my recent experience.

[autoboy]

It's not very green to throw out a computer when the old one was perfectly sufficient. This is the kind of backwards thinking you get when you make CO2 the ultimate bogeyman , when the heavy metals and toxic materials that made your computer are far more polluting than the power your PC uses.

You would be much better off optimizing the old one with undervolting and underclocking.

Check SilentPCReview.com for suggestions.

[heatvent]

Originally Posted by autoboy

It's not very green to throw out a computer when the old one was perfectly sufficient. This is the kind of backwards thinking you get when you make CO2 the ultimate bogeyman , when the heavy metals and toxic materials that made your computer are far more polluting than the power your PC uses.

You would be much better off optimizing the old one with undervolting and underclocking.

Check SilentPCReview.com for suggestions.

I agree, but I don't think he said he was throwing it in the trash.

[motobarsteward]

Wow, thanks for all the comment.

PCs in my house are never thrown away! The just get taken apart and re-assembled as different machines and given to friends and relatives!

I take the comments about power saving not being as much as I would expect. I am replacing a P4 945 Prescott CPU and 8 port SATA MoBo with 7 HDDs in it with a much simpler system so I am still hopeful. I'm thinking of a SSHDD for the OS and a green HDD for the capture. The data storage is all on external USB HDDs.

The Mobo I'm looking at is £68 inc CPU, which I think I'd to get to with a desktop MoBo and CPU.

One of the riser cards I found has complimentary power connections so I hope to not have problems. Otherwise, I have enough electronic knowledge to provide a lower impedance PSU path for he card back to the MoBo.

[wado1971]

Originally Posted by motobarsteward

All up, my current server draws around 120 to 180W. Hibernated does not happen reliably....

I'm in the same boat -- server draws crazy power 24/7. I've tried to setup 'standby/sleep' multiple times (XP) but it makes the server/client system unstable. Although I recently built a client using the atom330/Ion platform (fantastic little system), my quad6600 server runs comskip & playon so this platform won't work on my server.

Even with that said, I would still suggest trying to get your server into a reliable standby mode when not in use. This will best achieve your goals for cost savings (power conservation). I understand this is contradictory to my own experiences (and yours) but it's still the best approach. Essentially turning a system off for ~16hrs/day will cut ANY cost by 66%.

Why does standby make a server unreliable? I'm using XP as the OS for the server -- Maybe W7 or WHS handles this better. Anyone have experience with server standby with these OS's?

[Graygeek]

FWIW ... if you manage to get all the planets to align you can get an XP server with HD100's to use S3 sleep very reliably. It takes a degree of googling for info and tinkering but once your there its great. I have the HD100's on a dedicated NIC with wake on directed packet set. When not busy my server takes a nice power saving nap! Keeps the dust inside the server down too! Server will wake when an HD100 powers on or is it is time to record a show.

[SWKerr]

Originally Posted by motobarsteward

Wow, thanks for all the comment.
I'm thinking of a SSHDD for the OS and a green HDD for the capture. The data storage is all on external USB HDDs.

This is my point. If you are going to replace everything you can get a lot more performance out of a i3 for not a whole lot of difference in the power draw compared to the Atom. You are also a lot more future proof.

Also: I don't think using external USB drives will be as efficient as internal drives from a power draw perspective.

[motobarsteward]

I wasn't having stability issues. The thing was going to sleep and staying asleep until a client, scheduled task or recording woke it up. Then, after a couple of days, I was finding that it would no longer go to sleep. I would then reboot it and it would then work for a few days before getting another attack of insomnia!

I just found myself up against the age old problem of not being able to find out what was keeping the machine awake. The problem is that there is no way of logging the internal mechanism used by windows to allow the machine to sleep.

My other driver, BTW, is cost. These nettop PC MoBo come with processors and are a lot cheaper the Desktop MoBo and processor combinations.

[Fuzzy]

I do believe win7 (maybe vista) have improved the sleep mechanism's... if nothign else, i do think there is some form of logging for the power management system now (though I've never actually looked for it).

Once you move to win7, play around with the POWERCFG.exe tool a bit. Lots of control in there.

[wado1971]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I do believe win7 (maybe vista) have improved the sleep mechanism's... if nothign else, i do think there is some form of logging for the power management system now (though I've never actually looked for it).

Once you move to win7, play around with the POWERCFG.exe tool a bit. Lots of control in there.

This is the first legitimate reason for me to move my server to W7 - and I've been searching for one since W7 was released.

[motobarsteward]

I just got an answer from sageTV. they say it will make a good server in every respect EXCEPT it may struggle with the transcoding required for place shifter, especially the HD sources.

[thomaszoo]

I have been using this for almost a year now:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16856107043

It is an Intel 330 based system. Like Sage said, don't plan on using it for transcoding. This would include Playon. Those are the down sides. The up sides are it is an incredibly stable machine. I think it has only locked up on me once. The dual core acts like a quad core so when running comskip each instance uses 25% CPU. Comskip runs real time for SD and HDHR recordings. For recordings made by the HD PVR it is really slow. But if you can wait until the next day to view those programs you won't have any problems. I run no more than 2 instances of Comskip simultaneously (max 50% CPU) which leaves way more than enough for the rest of the machine to be ultrastable. In fact, compared to the single core AMD 4000+ that it replaced it is far more reliable.

I have an OCZ SSD drive and a 2 TB WD green drive in the case along with a firewire card and an older Hauppauge (150) card. The case is pretty tight; no room for large cards but it does all work quite well. I also have a couple of HD-100 extenders for viewing. I usually use VNC for maintenance, although it is hooked up to my DLP for direct viewing.

While I do occasionally consider a stronger processor, when I get down to why it just never makes sense for me (I rarely use Playon and streaming is cool, but not how I like to watch my content). For me it really is a STB; it is as reliable and I rarely mess with it anymore (the family depends on it at this point).

Wayne

[ehfortin]

Hi,

It was also a project I had to move my old D920 desktop over to a new, dedicated SageTV server. I went with the Atom 330 (Intel D945GCLF2) as the one used by Fuzzy, thinking it would do a great firewall if I was to have problem with SageTV. As there is not much you can add to this board, let just say I've added 2 GB of RAM and a second GigE.

I then installed Windows Server 2003 (did try Windows XP as well but I really wanted to have a DHCP/DNS/SageTV machine). I had it working in a few hours (the hardest part was to get something workable from my old configuration that had a lot more plugins). I must say I'm using a HD-PVR as my input source so the hard work is done at this level. I don't do any transcoding either. Everything has been working nice for a few hours with 2 extender and one client, all running different stuff at the same time.

I actually even installed VirtualBox and a firewall (Astaro) on it. It is a little slow to start but once it is running, I can download at the maximum my pipe allow me (4 Mbps) without any problem. The CPU is humming below 50% when most of the stuff are doing transactions. It idle between 14-25%. That's after adding MSSQL Express 2008 for my photo manager (ID Imager pro, latest version). I'm using just below 1 GB which is 50% of the actual memory in the box. Not bad.

For those that don't know, the Atom 330 is actually a dual-core, dual-thread CPU so it shows as 4 CPU in the performance monitor of Windows. Basically, I've configured the FW on a single CPU. Yes, it peak a lot during the boot sequence but it doesn't seems to impact SageTV but... I can't be in front of all my TV at the same time so I'm not 100% sure (will have to wait to see if the kids are saying anything). Anyway, the FW is to be ON all the time as Sage so... they should reboot together most of the time which means not that often.

I'll see how it keep the road in the long run but I'm confident it will stay in this multi-role for a while.

ehfortin