Low energy PC

[GordonS]

Hi Guys,

I'm sure I can't be the only person looking to build a low-enrgy PC.

Do you have any guidelines and/or pointers to doing so from Novatech kit?

My particular need is for a new home server, mostly handling mail and filestore for a couple of workstations, so it doesn't need much power.

I'm presuming a mobile-class CPU of modest speed, preferably with fanless cooling, 2.5" drives, probably a GB of RAM and a DVD writer. Graphics can be pretty much anything as the box will run a turnkey Linux, mostly with X-Windows turned off.

TIA,

Gordon.

[djgandy]

Get one of these...
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/spec ... l?IL-E2200 (http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?IL-E2200)

As long as you get a fairly decent motherboard to go with it you'll be able to tweak voltages lower / under clock it so it uses less power. Also have SpeedStep on which slows down the processor when idle also cutting the voltage.

I'd assume you'll be able to cool it with a heatsink alone since these things run very cool on the standard Intel HSF even when overclocked.

[system7]

Got to agree with dj, those E2XXX CPUs are the way to go.

I suppose you could get some single core Celeron like 440 using same technology, but what's the point?

You will need some proper fan CPU cooling though. At idle they are very low power, but under load they creep up:
http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/3796/hardwaremonitordz7.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Since a power supply's consumption varies with load, there's no real reason to try and get an excessively small one.

I had a look at some ITX boards, using notebook drives and such:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article780-page1.html
Can't say i'd want such a crippled machine! :?