"going green", part two - mini-PCs!

[VirtualLarry]

If you had an i7 with 32GB of RAM and a pair of SSDs you wouldn't endlessly buy slow crap on special than moan about why its so slow.

You're the only person complaining about performance in this thread.

And all of the mini-PCs I mentioned getting, I believe, were "big core"-based units. Not the slower "small cores".

 

[cbn]

For that i7 4790K and 32GB RAM, I reckon that would make a good multi-user server.

So I have to wonder about the economics and practicality of having some very low power units and i7-4790K/32GB (as server for heavy lifting) vs. some green computers with more grunt( like these with 35 watt Haswell "T' CPU processors) coupled to NAS?

 

[VirtualLarry]

For that i7 4790K and 32GB RAM, I reckon that would make a good multi-user server.

So I have to wonder about the economics and practicality of having some very low power units and i7-4790K/32GB (as server for heavy lifting) vs. some green computers with more grunt( like these with 35 watt Haswell "T' CPU processors) coupled to NAS?

I was actually thinking about doing something like that. In another thread, it was brought up that unRAID ver 6.x is adding extensive VM features. It would be fairly practical to upgrade my unRAID server, and use it for both storage, and running VMs off of. Then I could use one of those MSI Cubi mini-PCs (or possibly even dig out those NanoPCs with the C-70 in them, since I would only be using them for RDP).

The only issue that gives me pause, for that, is Skype and burning discs. I don't know if RDP can remote webcams and optical drives to burn with. I might have to put the discs into the server, to burn, and I don't know what I'd do about Skype. (With the added caveat that running Skype on those NanoPCs really cripples them, so I think local Skype and RDP for server stuff would also be out. Probably not a problem with the Cubi though.)

I've read that AMD's 990FX chipset supports IOMMU fairly well, so I was thinking of using my 990FX Extreme4 mobo for my unRAID server, in place of the GA-P35C-DS3R with the Q6600. But I think that the Q6600 supports at least VT-x, so I could potentially try unRAID 6.x without doing too much of an upgrade, at least initially.

 

[cbn]

The unRAID virtualization looks very interesting (still learning about it).

http://lime-technology.com/qa-with-tom-on-unraid-virtualization/

http://lime-technology.com/unraid-6-virtualization-update/

I've also been wondering with Windows 10 having virtual desktops , If MS by Windows 11 ends up adding some kind of limited multi-user capability to certain home versions of the OS.