Zacate game server, power consumption questions

[PingSpike]

I've got the upgrade itch and want to drop the power usage on my server that currently does WSUS, torrents and file serving duties for me. I'm sure a zacate setup would do these tasks fine for me but I occasionally toy with the idea of running a small game server. A 6 man Killing Floor, a 4 man L4D2 or maybe some day a minecraft server. Has anyone tried running something like that on zacate? Or even an Atom?

I've seen the Atom question asked elsewhere and its usually a bunch of people suggesting you need quad core Xeons to run a game server. While Atom or zacate may not be up to the task I feel like they are heavily overstating things and ignoring the possibility some one might run only one server on a machine. In my case my connection would limit me from doing much more than that anyway.

I don't really need the GPU performance of zacate so I also looked at Atom solutions. But they appear to be the same price as zacate or way more. And the cheaper ones use so-dimms or DDR2. I'm done with DDR2 and I have no DDR3 so-dimms and I intend to keep it that way. Intel doesn't appear to be competing very aggressively with AMD's offering. I was under the impression the zacate setup beat Atom in CPU performance as well.

Also if anyone could let me know what they're getting for power consumption out of these platforms that would be great. I have an Antec EA380 in my server now but I'm not sure that is the best option on a very low power consumption machine like this. The machine has two hard drives in it and nothing else.

 

[Broheim]

have you looked at a G620 and a cheap H61 board, it should be in the same price and power consumption range but with a lot more cpu power. (I'm not entirely sure about the power consumption but the bench says 32 watts full system draw under load for the e-350 and 76 for G620+HD5870, so substract the discrete card and you have a very effecient cpu)

 

[PingSpike]

Yeah, it seems to use twice as much power really at both idle and load. My current system doesn't really use much more than that although I'm sure that would have much better performance.

X-bit labs has a review of it where it doesn't seem to have a discrete card: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/pentium-g850-g840-g620_7.html And that is measured after the PSU so there's no efficiency loss in their measurement. Actual draw will be worse.

Edit: My mistake, it looks like they have a 6950 in there.