Minimizing power consumption

[doanster]

I'm recycling an old Athlon 64 3700+ system into a simple file and print server. To minimize power consumption, which option would work better?

1. Underclocking the CPU. Currently running at 2.4GHz stock (89W power reference), wondering if bringing it down to say 1.4GHz and reducing the voltage would have noticeable power savings. Possibly underclocking the RAM as well.

2. Enable Cool n' Quiet and let CPU throttling be done automatically.

3. Both?

4. Other ideas?

(an efficient power supply is already in the works as well)

 

[ShawnD1]

For a file server, you can bring it much lower than 1.4ghz and still have plenty of speed. A few years ago I was using a 350MHz Pentium 2 file server running XP Home and it was capable of delivering files at 30MB/s over the gigabit network. It only encountered CPU issues if I tried to have NTFS compression on those files, but most people don't use NTFS compression so that's really a non-issue.

Cool & Quiet probably won't do anything if you are able to underclock the hell out of the CPU. I assume you could probably leave it on; makes no difference.

Depending on your current graphics card, you may want to look at buying a GPU that uses less power. If your computer was thrown together using old high end parts like a GeForce 7800, it will consume a lot of power even though the GPU isn't doing anything.

Unervolting the RAM is pointless. The reason memory doesn't have heatsinks or fans is because it uses less power than any other part of the computer.

 

[Lean L]

Give that compu away and buy a cheap $30 thin client off ebay. Those things consume around 20 watts under load and much less idle.

 

[fffblackmage]

At least for my e6320, lowering voltages and reducing freq manually yielded much better results than letting intel's speedstep do the job. Checked using a kill-a-watt meter.

Things like speedstep and cnq will only lower power consumption by only a certain amount, because it has to work with ALL cpus. So, there's typically room for more improvement if you do it yourself.