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<100w decent performance build?

Red Squirrel

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
I'm thinking of building a secondary machine which I would use for Linux, and use my current machine for Windows. Current machine is a core i7 based machine with add-on video card and uses a couple hundred watts last I checked. My curent machine will become the Windows machine and probably only get turned on when I want to game.

I don't want the secondary machine to use that much power as well but still want it to have half decent performance for average games (like Minecraft for example) and every day usage where I'll have Firefox with like 20 tabs open, Thunderbird and various every day apps always being used. Occasional video editing, that kind of stuff. What processor/motherboard/video card would you recommend for decent power draw? I recall people saying they got a machine down to like 20w in another thread though I'm guessing that's with an underclocked atom or even arm based system and small/basic motherbboard or something along those lines so 20w is probably too much to ask for, but just looking for a decent balance of performance and power usage. I'm in Canada so trying to find specific models of components is probably not going to work out that well as we tend to be more limited, but I'm just wondering what series of products I should be looking at, or any features I should be looking for when buying a motherboard for example.

Also I want to do triple monitor, though since Linux can't do that very well I'm even debating on just going back to dual monitors and giving up. I do want to try a Matrox Triplehead2go though but that's a purchase I'll do later. So I'm even wondering if I should go with a motherboard that has built on video, as add-on video cards add 100w+ on their own these days. Downside is most probably wont have two DVI ports.

For OS drive I'd be using a SSD. Already have two in my machine which I dual boot too so I'd probably move the Linux one to the new machine and hope it boots, if not I'd reinstall.
 
How committed are you to exactly 100W max? My first thought is a high-end i3 + GTX 750ti, but the combined TDP is maybe 120W. Below that you probably want some AMD APU.
 
Fine with a bit over 100w, just don't want to be in the multiple 100 like my current i7 rig is. I'll be leaving that one off and on it's own UPS and only powering it up when I want to game. I'm thinking of putting this new machine on the same UPS as my server stuff for the extended run time (~4 hours) but don't want it to eat too much into the battery run time either. Though that's still up in the air I might still leave it on a separate UPS. If power goes out my priority is keeping the servers going and I end up just using my phone and wifi.

I'll probably be using my existing Radeon HD 7870 as I've had bad luck with Nvidia in Linux so rather just stick with what I have and works. Might change to something more efficient in the future if there are better options though but also trying to use what I have on hand. I have two GTX 560's I'll be putting in the Windows machine(current machine) as they worked fine in Windows (other than occasional driver crash) but were terrible in Linux.

This is kind of a Frankenstein build as I'm trying to use parts I already have on hand so I might be sacrificing some possibilities for saving power. What about ram does that make a difference? I will be using 3 sticks of GSkill 4GB ram that I have on hand. Was a 4x kit but one stick died so I'll use 3 or maybe even 2 as some motherboards don't like impair numbers. Firefox alone uses close to 4GB of ram so I'll probably want to have at least 8GB.
 
Getting a new GPU is probably the single biggest thing you can do to impact gaming power use. Nvidia is much more power- efficient than AMD right now. I'll be installing a 750ti in my Linux computer tomorrow so I can let you know how that goes. Edit: Come to think of it though I did have a lot of trouble with multiple monitors on Nvidia. If you don't go Nvidia, probably back to that APU.

The #2 and 3 impacts are probably CPU and PSU. RAM probably isn't in the picture.
 
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Hmm I figured the newer GPUs were even more power hungry? They seem to come with bigger and bigger and bigger heatsink/fans these days and that seems it would be a good indication of how much heat they produce as they require bigger dissipation, thus power usage. (power usage = heat)

Also I'm open to going AMD like you linked to, for cpu/motherboard, is AMD worth looking at? AMD cpus and motherboards are also way cheaper which is a bonus. I just figured they were considered more power hungry so skipped over.

Never even thought of PSU, any brands/specs I should be looking at? I typically try to look for 80+ efficient ones as well.

When looking at CPU is TDP a good indication for power usage? From what I read it is the average power usage during normal tasks, so does it mean it goes lower when idle? Just coding or light web browsing is probably fairly close to idle for a cpu I imagine.
 
Depends on how much performance you want and how much you are willing to go over 100 watts. An i3 with a GTX750 or 750Ti will give much better gaming than any APU, but use a bit more power. The Kaveri A10-7850k is 95 watts, while an i3 plus GTX 750/750 Ti would use up to 120 or 130 watts when both were under full load. But you will probably get close to double the gaming performance, making a fairly capable low/mid range system, while gaming on the APU will be much more limited.

If you are *sure* you will only be doing light gaming, for an APU I would suggest the A8-7600. It is almost 50.00 cheaper (98.00 on new egg) and is rated at only 65 watts. You dont really give up much performance relative to 7850k because the 7850k is bandwidth limited and does not perform that much better.
 
Is APU just a type of processor? How does that work, does it mean that the graphic card is not doing the work but the cpu is instead? Just having the graphic card still uses power though no? So may as well go with the i3 with a graphic card. (I'll be using my existing one for now, may upgrade later). Or is it meant to boost performance of onboard graphics while skipping video card?

So in respect to power is i3 better than i5, while still delivering close to the same performance?
 
"APU" is AMD's code name for a CPU with an integrated GPU that's fairly good for gaming.

I hadn't thought about the i5 s and t models. Usually nobody gets them unless it's for a thermal limited HTPC or something. I'm not really sure which is better in this case.

Edit: TDP is the maximum continuous power usage of a part. Idle power usage is almost always much lower these days
 
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Red Squirrel said:
I don't want the secondary machine to use that much power as well but still want it to have half decent performance for average games (like Minecraft for example) and every day usage where I'll have Firefox with like 20 tabs open, Thunderbird and various every day apps always being used. Occasional video editing, that kind of stuff. What processor/motherboard/video card would you recommend for decent power draw? I recall people saying they got a machine down to like 20w in another thread though I'm guessing that's with an underclocked atom or even arm based system and small/basic motherbboard or something along those lines so 20w is probably too much to ask for, but just looking for a decent balance of performance and power usage. I'm in Canada so trying to find specific models of components is probably not going to work out that well as we tend to be more limited, but I'm just wondering what series of products I should be looking at, or any features I should be looking for when buying a motherboard for example.
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Agree with the other posters, an AMD APU like the A8-7600 seems like a good fit for this.

For maximum power-saving you can get a mini-ITX board, they're usually more efficient then mATX or ATX boards. With the added advantage of allowing smaller cases. I have a 6800K + ITX board (Gigabyte GA-F2A85XN-WIFI) in my HTPC, doesn't draw more then 22W idle. Load power can reach 125W, with CPU + GPU fully loaded, but the 6800K isn't known for efficiency. It handles everyday stuff with ease.

You shouldn't skimp on the PSU either, a good quality, high-efficiency, low-wattage (like the Seasonic G-360) unit can go a long way.
 
I would tend to agree with Frozen's original suggestion... an i3 with a GTX750Ti or similar. You mentioned video editing and gaming... that says i3 at a minimum, even if it busts your wattage limits a tad. And like the others mentioned, at idle or normal PC use, they don't draw that much power, it would only be when encoding or gaming they would start to suck a little more juice... but you get what you pay for, CPU power to do the tasks you outline in a reasonable manner requires power.

I would hate for you to spend the money on a build and not have it deliver simply because you downgraded the components to fit under a power threshold. 🙁

I have two GTX 560's I'll be putting in the Windows machine
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...you could power a small city on what it takes to run those... 😀
 
OP - do you want 100W at load or idle?

A Core i3, h97 board, and 750Ti would use about 40W at idle, and about 120W at load. That's a fantastic setup, but do you need that much GPU power? A 750 Ti is about 20% slower than your 7870 (but uses less than half the power).

An AMD APU could be a good option, but only if you are dead-set on doing very moderate gaming and keeping it under 100W. If you don't care much about gaming, an i3 is a much better bet, and if you really do care about gaming, an i3+750Ti is a better bet.

And you can do triple-monitor on most motherboards with built-in video - potentially using an HDMI-to-DVI adapter if DVI is what you need. Motherboards from the midrange and up will have DVI, VGA, and HDMI (one each), with the higher-end boards adding DisplayPort.
 
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Mostly concerned about idle, I understand that if I'm running some kind of process that uses the cpu/gpu it will use more power, that's fine. I don't want to sacrifice performance too much so I'm kind of wanting the best balance of performance and low power, of course you kind of have to sacrifice one to have the other but looking for best medium. I'm thinking the i3 as suggested may be my best bet then? Did not realize they could go as low as 40w. How does my existing 7870 hold in terms of power usage? I kind of want to stick to it to save money and because I know it works in Linux, but I can always upgrade later on.
 
Termie said:
OP - do you want 100W at load or idle?
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Yes, this is absolutely the correct question to be asking here. Modern PC's have a huge dynamic power range, which actual power draw heavily depending on the load that's being presented.

TDP stands for Thermal Design Power, which describes the maximum power draw of a component over a thermally significant period of time. It's a metric designed to be used by integrators when designing cooling solutions. It's also useful for enthusiasts when determining the maximum power draw under heavy load. It says nothing about power consumption at idle or lesser loads.

I tend to agree with the i3 + GTX 750 Ti solution because you're wanting to run Linux. Intel and Nvidia have good Linux support; AMD less so, especially on newer GPUs and IGPs.

Finally, I'm not sure why the OP says that triple monitor doesn't work well on Linux. X is extremely flexible and can handle essentially arbitrarily complex display configurations. If you're having trouble with your new rig, post up your xorg.conf and let's see if we can fix it.
 
You can only do 2 monitors in X then any other have to be in a separate X session, but then things get flaky. I'll probably end up buying a Matrox TripleHead2Go at some point though not sure how well that will work as it treats 3 monitors as 1 so stuff is going to open all over the place. There's Xinerama and other work arounds but they too just treat 2 monitors as one and it gets ugly. Also had tons of bad luck with Nvidia in Linux. Would get tons of issues like square artifacts and stuff, and some issues not even directly related to video such as cursor getting stuck everywhere or GUI completely locking up and all the issues went away when I went with the ATI card so I rather stick with ATI.

Right now I'm using a secondary machine with synergy to drive the 2 side monitors but I might retire that setup as it just adds a layer of complexity. I'll probably go to 2 monitors till I decide to buy the Triplehead2go. Another issue with Linux multi monitors is the primary can't be anything but the 1st, it does not really have a concept of primary monitor it just defaults to the first. With a triple monitor setup you want it to be the 2nd monitor that's primary.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Mostly concerned about idle, I understand that if I'm running some kind of process that uses the cpu/gpu it will use more power, that's fine. I don't want to sacrifice performance too much so I'm kind of wanting the best balance of performance and low power, of course you kind of have to sacrifice one to have the other but looking for best medium. I'm thinking the i3 as suggested may be my best bet then? Did not realize they could go as low as 40w. How does my existing 7870 hold in terms of power usage? I kind of want to stick to it to save money and because I know it works in Linux, but I can always upgrade later on.
Click to expand...

I can't answer your Linux questions, but as for the 7870, at the time it was introduced, it was considered incredibly efficient. Versus the latest options from Nvidia, it's less impressive, but still very, very good. With an i3, you're looking at about 150W in a gaming load scenario, and about 45W at idle.
 
Wow that's pretty good, I'll take that. I'm wanting to use ram that I already have and going through the compatibility list I found this motherboard, does this look good?

Motherboard:
http://www.ncix.com/detail/asus-z97-a-atx-lga1150-ddr3-4a-97021-1029.htm

rest of components:

cpu:
http://www.ncix.com/detail/intel-core-i3-i3-4150-haswell-2b-96206-1029.htm

PSU:
http://www.ncix.com/detail/corsair-cx-series-cx600m-600w-83-78577-1029.htm

Ram: (I already have it on hand - using 3 sticks as 1 is dead)
http://gskill.com/en/product/f3-17000cl9q-16gbzh

I'll stick with the 7870 for now. This is all going in a 4U rackmount case and I'm buying another 4U for my Windows box. My workstations are in the server room below my office. Less noise, less dust and less heat in my office that way. 😉
 
FYI, I just installed my new 750ti. It's working great! 🙂 The installation worked fine with my existing Nvidia driver, though I proceeded to update. The only problem I had was that my SSD's root filesystem had errors and got locked again. 🙄
 
Red Squirrel said:
You can only do 2 monitors in X then any other have to be in a separate X session, but then things get flaky. I'll probably end up buying a Matrox TripleHead2Go at some point though not sure how well that will work as it treats 3 monitors as 1 so stuff is going to open all over the place. There's Xinerama and other work arounds but they too just treat 2 monitors as one and it gets ugly. Also had tons of bad luck with Nvidia in Linux. Would get tons of issues like square artifacts and stuff, and some issues not even directly related to video such as cursor getting stuck everywhere or GUI completely locking up and all the issues went away when I went with the ATI card so I rather stick with ATI.

Right now I'm using a secondary machine with synergy to drive the 2 side monitors but I might retire that setup as it just adds a layer of complexity. I'll probably go to 2 monitors till I decide to buy the Triplehead2go. Another issue with Linux multi monitors is the primary can't be anything but the 1st, it does not really have a concept of primary monitor it just defaults to the first. With a triple monitor setup you want it to be the 2nd monitor that's primary.
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Your artifacting issues sound more like a bad card than any thing else. But if you've gotten AMD cards working to your satisfaction, then more power to you. There's certainly not anything wrong with a 7870 for your use case.

Your comments about the capabilities of X are incorrect. X can handle an arbitrary number of displays grouped into virtual screens in an arbitrary way. You can order and arrange them however you wish. PM me your xorg.conf if you'd like to debug further.
 
mfenn said:
Your artifacting issues sound more like a bad card than any thing else. But if you've gotten AMD cards working to your satisfaction, then more power to you. There's certainly not anything wrong with a 7870 for your use case.

Your comments about the capabilities of X are incorrect. X can handle an arbitrary number of displays grouped into virtual screens in an arbitrary way. You can order and arrange them however you wish. PM me your xorg.conf if you'd like to debug further.
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Combining into one is the issue, I don't want that, it's a cheap workaround. Apps open half way between two screens and all over the place, it's just horrible. It also kills any graphics support once you do Xinerama. I don't do a lot of gaming in Linux but I still don't want to completely eliminate the possibility.

The artifact stuff happened on both cards so I know it was not the card itself, probably the driver. Did not want to go Nvidia again in case it ends up using the same driver.

I think I might end up going back to dual screen though, I can live with two, but not one. Right now I have a secondary machine running the two side screens and synergy to be able to move across but it's kinda a pain needing two PCs running, and now I'm adding yet another PC so rather just get rid of the other PC from this equation. If I make the middle screen primary Linux one then right screen secondary I can make the left screen be the secondary in windows and middle one will be primary in windows (on a KVM), so if I need to put up anything that I want to monitor but not control I can still KVM into windows and put it on the secondary (which would be the left screen) then switch back to Linux and then work on the centre and right screen. Linux does not let you to set a screen as primary and uses the first one so this would work out anyway as the middle would be the first in Linux.

Would really be nice if Linux improved multi screen support though, even Windows multi monitor can be really flaky at times, it would be nice to see Linux do it even better than Windows, not worse.

But, that's another topic anyway. 😛 Posted about trying to get a solution before but there does not seem to be any options to get a real 3 monitor setup in Linux without some nasty hacks/workarounds.
 
Monitors can use more power than a computer with no video card. USB devices like a wireless adapter can also use a lot of power. I guess I really need to have one of those kill-a-watt meters to test my own gear just to see how much power it uses. I wonder how much power a 40" HDTV uses? That is what I use as a monitor.

I wonder how much power a wireless keyboard or a Centrino card uses?
 
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My 50" uses a paltry amount of power compared to a computer. I forget what it tested at but I recall it being quite low, like under 1 amp. When I ran it on a small 1000va UPS (along with other stuff like Raspbery Pi, cable box etc) it ran for like 10 minutes and then some, I plugged it back in before it died. My computer on that same UPS lasted maybe 5 minutes. I think that's when I had the two 560 TI's in it though. It used like 200w idle and like 500w+ at load. It's also a core i7. 😛

What's impressive is the Xeons, those are probably the most efficient chips. All my new servers use less than 100w. In fact before I put drives in my file server and tested it, it was using about the same as one of my Atom servers, about 75w.
 
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