Re: Low power PC

["David Gumbrell" <david.gumbrell@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jon,

I think your wall cabinet limitation is rather significant. I have a
400mm-ish depth wall cabinet, but setting back the vertical rails a bit to
allow for cabling back and front (network switch and patch panels in there
too) etc, and the actual usable depth is reduced quite a bit. I could find
only two case options, the ICP ones, which are quite nice and now stocked
b=
y
LinITX and Avrio which are cheaper, but a little nasty.  The ICP are 1U or
2U, various depths, including as little as 230mm, but, last time I looked,
specific to miniITX (and not all of them). The Avrios take normal ATX sized
boards and again are not very deep, but I'm not sure they have a 1U that
would work with typical heat sinks etc.

I have a 2U Avrio which I used with an old PII board and 4 network cards
fo=
r
a firewall (now replaced with one of the 6-port jobbies from LinITX).
Corte=
x
runs on a 1U miniITX based machine.

Last time I checked it was around the 40-45W mark. I don't do video capture
on it because my card seems to be incompatible with the VIA chipset. Not
sure of processor loading, but haven't seen any problems and runs smoothly
enough using remote desktop. Apart from first build it has never had a
screen connected.

That said, I am considering building a 3U Core 2 Duo based machine to
incorporate the video capture. I have a separate NAS so can't speak to file
serving.

Cheers,

David

On 1/9/07, Jonathan Shaw <semi.jon@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>   There were some discussions a couple of months ago about how much
> power a PC can use when running 24x7 and why a dedicated NAS was far
> more economical for a file server.
>
> I am about to buy a PC to run Idratek Cortex and as this will run
> 24x7 are so can I assume that:
>
> * This PC could (when I need it) also run as a file server (more
> disks needed)
> * more disks in the PC that is running anyway would be more efficient
> than an additional NAS
>
> I've had a browse on the latest processors and it seems that they can
> be ranked for Power (Watts and "grunt") roughly as:
> VIA mini-ITX based
> AMD Sempron
> Intel Core Duo
>
> Ultimately I plan to put this into a small wall mount rack. Many
> desk tops are too deep to fit into a 400 or 450mm deep rack (like
> this one http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?
> ViewItem&item=3D250054727796) once their connectors are on the
back,
>
> I had planned to buy off the shelf rather than build so of pre-built
> boxes Mini ITX systems and Intel boxes come in about =A3500 sometimes
> with a screen (which I need), whereas this AMD box from misco
> http://tinyurl.com/y3s7hs is =A3235
(No screen)
>
> Have I missed something important in selecting a machine?
>
> Any other recommendations out there?
>
> Thanks
> Jon
>
>=20=20
>


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