new assembly of old gear, power?

[skyking]

I tossed together some stuff I had, a gigabyte ma785gm mobo, phenom 555@3200, couple of gigs of ram in a htpc case with a power brick type PS. It's idling at 57 watts on my kill-a-watt.
That sound reasonable? I know there are other lower powered setups, but I have this, and all it lacks for me is usb3.
that's a $15 card away.
what do you guys see on your server/htpc?

 

[skyking]

going out and answering my own question
I can get this for 72$
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157728&Description=mini itx motherboard/cpu combo&cm_re=mini_itx_motherboard/cpu_combo-_-13-157-728-_-Product

I need a low profile hsf for my old hardware above -$24
I only have 1 gb sticks of ram, so i can max out at 4 gb
I have a 4gb stick of ddr3l i pulled from my lappy, can get another for +$20
the reduction in power usage and potential noise is enough to spend $68 more and get a whole lot more computer.
USB3 included.
I hate myself for looking

 

[skyking]

I pulled the trigger on this finally, LOL. I had set it aside. Tossing the old stuff in the computer recycle bin with a bunch of other dated gear.

 

[Charlie98]

My i3 Sandy idles at almost 100w... but it's not just an HTPC.

Tossing the old stuff in the computer recycle bin

Getting rid of temptation?

 

[skyking]

I have boxes and boxes to purge. I figure it was time to help out the economy a bit and get a 'new' piece of gear.
I used to idle bigger computers but I'm just not feeling it anymore. Pay to add heat to the house in the summer and remove it with air conditioning? Yeah No.

The new mobo combo idles at less than 10, toss in a few raided drives at about a watt each and still under a 20 watt heat budget.
This is not even an HTPC per se, no tuner cards in it, not recording broadcast TV. More just a media and file server. My old one was running a 1000 hz via eden processor and chipset, underclocked. I would have kept it going but it kept doing flakey writes to the OS, effectively killing the reliability.
commell le-565

 

[Charlie98]

More just a media and file server.

That's all mine is. I've got 2 5TB drives that serve up stored video. I was using WMC to stream Netflix... until they pulled support. My wife actually started to use it as a PC, so I'm glad I overbuilt it... it works well as a basic PC, too.

 

[skyking]

Mine run headless with probably Debian on this one. I might run Plex or something, once I figure out the music side of things.

 

[ElFenix]

I tossed together some stuff I had, a gigabyte ma785gm mobo, phenom 555@3200, couple of gigs of ram in a htpc case with a power brick type PS. It's idling at 57 watts on my kill-a-watt.
That sound reasonable? I know there are other lower powered setups, but I have this, and all it lacks for me is usb3.
that's a $15 card away.
what do you guys see on your server/htpc?

that seems about right. i remember being able to get a quad core k10 down into the 50s or 60s in a box with a few hard drives.

 

[skyking]

my new mobo is hung up in the shipping fiasco. The ram will be here with nowhere to go

 

[VirtualLarry]

See the Hot Deals forum, but there was a 3rd-party reseller on Newegg's Marketplace, selling REFURB Gigabyte LM78T-USB3 R2 mATX boards for $64.99. Seemed somewhat reasonable, seeing as they don't make those anymore, and new ones are going for like $160+. They're AM3/AM3+, will take FX chips, not sure what the max TDP is, but it's at least 125W, not sure about 140W.

 

[skyking]

thanks, I already ordered the micro board in the OP. I want less heat than the AM3's

 

[Charlie98]

Mine run headless with probably Debian on this one. I might run Plex or something, once I figure out the music side of things.

I'm in search of a new media interface, since the move to W10 will DX WMC, which I was very fond of. Plex was suggested, as well as MediaPortal... and there is always Kodi.

 

[skyking]

Of those, only plex and Kodi are applicable. Mediaportal is a windows application. I have the OS, DB server, Apache2, and zoneminder going so far. Now I am seriously kicking the tires.
Plex, I am not sure about yet. I may grab and try Kodi first.

 

[skyking]

I found a free app for using old androids with zoneminder. I stuck one out by the hummingbird feeder and have zoneminder doing motion detection.

 

[skyking]

I had been running one of the 50 MM case fans, but it was noisy so I went fanless yesterday.
Temps peaked at 45C
I am good with that. It will run between 39~45C, and the processor spec is 105C max.

 

[skyking]

Here is the case with a fanless 120 watt PSU. It runs at 15W on my kill-a-watt under a typical load, with the OS on an SSD and a 1Tb laptop drive for data. I don't host video files, and barely use a corner of that drive.

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