Trying to put some old socket 939 AMD's to use. Energy efficient? Green?

[wenis]

I have several 3 AMD socket 939 machines, including my main gaming rig, which is due for replacement. They are perfectly good machines for other uses. One is my HTPC and I'm going to just keep that one they way it it is, but the other two I may use as home server and test machine or websites and other projects. I'm going to tuck them away in a closet somewhere. The thing is, I don't need alot the processing power( just enough to handle some basic services), I just want them to be stable, energy efficient and run fairly cool. Am I waisting my time with these chips?

So I guess I'm asking, what I can do to these machines to make them fit this criteria? Should I buy energy efficient Power supplies? Strip them of engery hungry componets? Can I go passive cooling? Should I or can I de-clock these chips or are they too power hungry to even use for these purposes? Will the power saving function in WIndows and Linux give me much benefit? It would be a shame to retire them. What can be done to make them ideal "always on" machines? This is how I prefer to use older harware, but the power costs and heat created scare me.

Any help would appreciated.

 

[Modular]

Set em to a F@H project and forget about them.

 

[JackMDS]

You can use the native power scheme to let them sleep when they are Not used.

Do not use the power saving on the Network card leave it Off. This setting does not save much and it created Network problem.

Otherwise compute the actual power usage of components (posted stories are not sub for numbers) before you get rid of anything wasting money on passive cooling in order to get rid of a fan that takes 25mA is not a priority, 500W power supply does not take significantly more than 200W if use with the same system.