AMD’s focus on low power and low cost CPUs and chipsets keep them at the forefront of home server builder’s minds when spec’ing a new build. After investigation of the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition yielded great performance with lots of power consumption and the Sempron 140 EE offered solid power consumption figures but anemic performance, it is finally time to look at something in the middle. Today we will be reviewing the AMD Athlon II X2 260 Regor CPU which is a dual core AMD CPU with 2MB of L2 cache running at 3.2GHz. Adding twice the number of CPU cores and twice the cache of the Sempron 140 EE is sure to add performance and power consumption, but it has half of the cores of the Phenom II X4 955 BE and does not have a huge L3 cache using power.

To keep things consistent, I brought back the Corsair Dominator GT (DDR3 1600 C7) box used in the Sempron 140 review as the WHS enclosure for this review. Yes, this is a WHS in a cardboard box take II. Continue Reading

As one would gather from my previous Intel Atom D510 and NM10 post, I am not the biggest fan of the current D510 Atom platform with NM10 chipset. ZOTAC, to its credit, did take a rather mediocre platform and build a solid board around it. The most probable use case is a streaming media HTPC (non h.264) to a legacy 720p display. The nice thing about the ZOTAC offering is that it has quite a few expansion options for a D510/ NM10 based system, and it is ready to go out of the box. Unlike other Intel and AMD platforms, the Atom D510 and accompanying heatsink do not need to be installed by the user. One can literally plug in a display, mouse, keyboard, RAM, storage drive(s), and 20-pin power source and start using the system. As a preview, my end conclusion is that the ZOTAC board is a great choice given the platform, but the Intel platform leaves a lot to be desired. Continue Reading

Out with the old and in with the new, but worse platform. I have been wondering about the Intel Atom D510 performance for quite a while now alongside the NM10 chipset. It is essentially Intel’s upgrade to the venerable dual-core Intel Atom N330. With the consolidation of features to the D510 and NM10 Intel was able to get rid of a power- hungry 90nm process component and deliver a reduced feature set in the name of lower power consumption. For low power file servers, the Atom platform is great. One will notice these days that Intel’s 32nm Clarkdale line has idle power consumption similar to the D510. Where the Atom CPUs really shine is in load power consumption. Unlike the Core i3-530 and Core i5-650 (and their higher clocked Clarkdale brethren), the Atom CPUs are somewhat famous for only adding a nominal amount of power consumption when being fully taxed versus sitting idle. That is why many of the NAS appliance vendors that run proprietary Linux distributions choose the Atom to do software raid parity calculations.

Sadly, Intel has decided to leave the NAS and HTPC markets out to look at other offerings instead of its Atom D510 platform. Continue Reading

After the Intel Xeon X3440 review, I wanted to see the difference between the X3440 and the Intel Core i7-860. Of course, I could have just purchased a Core i7-860, but instead I decided to get an Intel Xeon X3460 because it is essentially the same CPU, just with ECC support. For all intents and purposes, the Intel Xeon X3460′s performance should be identical to the Core i7-860.

The major difference between the Intel Xeon X3460 and the previously reviewed Xeon X3440 is clock speed. The X3460 runs at 2.8ghz while the X3440 runs at 2.53GHz. Price wise the 0.27ghz will cost another $120 or about 50% more depending on street price fluctuation.

To keep this comparable, I wanted to see a performance of the X3460 versus the other CPU’s I have tested for video encoding and transcoding on a Windows Home Server platform. Second, I wanted to have a server running Microsoft Hyper-V Server with Windows Home Server and Ubuntu 10.04 as guest operating systems running in Hyper-V virtual machines. In the end, I found that the Xeon X3460 was slightly faster than I had anticipated.

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As a follow-on to the Supermicro X8SIL-F review, I had some interest in seeing power consumption figures for the CPU’s involved. I have already discussed the Intel Core i3-530′s low idle power consumption and relatively low maximum power consumption extensively. As I have a habit of doing, I decided to use an Intel Xeon X3340 in the new server for two reasons. First, I wanted to see a performance of the X3440 versus the other CPU’s I have tested for video encoding and transcoding on a Windows Home Server platform. Second, I wanted to have a server running Microsoft Hyper-V Server with Windows Home Server and Ubuntu 10.04 as guest operating systems running in Hyper-V virtual machines. In the end, I found that the Xeon X3440 provides a great feature set, relatively low power consumption, and performance all at a reasonable cost.

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To update to my review of the Supermicro X8SIL-F, I took some Kill-A-Watt power consumption numbers with the Supermicro X8SIL-F to answer a few questions regarding power consumption with real server hardware compared to consumer-level hardware. Below I am focusing on idle power consumption as with the Intel Core i3-530, Xeon X3440, and other LGA 1156 CPUs the CPU utilization while running a NAS application will be very low. After a bit of testing I found the i3-530 again leading the pack in idle power consumption and the Xeon X3440 turning in very respectable idle power consumption numbers.

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After using one of the the lowest power AMD CPUs around, the Sempron 140 Sargas (single core) in a WHS, I decided to go to the other extreme and try a Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition. With the release of six core AMD CPU’s, and the existence of the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, the  Phenom II X4 BE chip is not the highest end AMD CPU out there. On the other hand, WHS is currently based on the older 32-bit Windows Server 2003 kernel, so it runs on dual core CPU’s just fine. The impending release of Windows Home Server V2 VAIL means that 64-bit will be the new requirement and a bit more power will be needed for future WHS systems. A quad core is overkill but a six core CPU is basically a waste for WHS. Luckily, with the Phenom II X4 955 BE’s unlocked multiplier, we can emulate a Phenom II X4 965 BE through a very mild overclock, and some other AMD CPUs as well. The following is a quick review of what I encountered with the Phenom II X4 955 BE, and how I managed to get the Phenom II X4 955 to boot using the PicoPSU (to get comparable idle power consumption figures).

Phenom II X4 955 Boxed

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Sempron 140 WHS - In a Corsair Cardboard Box

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Intel’s Clarkdale and H55/ H57 platforms are quite intriguing for several reasons. First, the performance is fairly good starting at 2.93ghz, and with hyperthreading, it is possible to get closer to a quad core performance in some tasks where multiple cores do well, such as video encoding. A second aspect is that Intel moved the IGP to an on package solution and really cut the power consumption/ heat dissipation of the platform. Finally, the cost of an i3-530 or i5-650 CPU plus a motherboard is often in the $200 or less range, making them quite affordable.

Two great uses for the chips are home servers and HTPC’s. Low power consumption and low heat generation ultimately enable lower acoustic signatures, as well as lower TCO through lower electric draw.

Core i5-650, Gigabyte H55M-UD2H, Dual Intel Pro/1000 GT PCI NICs

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When Intel announced the i3-530 and i5-6xx family, I was full bore on building the Big WHS which included an LGA-1366 i7-920 CPU. The new i3-530 and i5-650 are based on the 32nm Clarkdale core with an integrated, on package GPU. For the home server world, read low power consumption and integrated graphics. To say the least that combination, along with the low cost of the parts + motherboards had me eagerly purchasing a $99 i3-530 from Microcenter and a $99 Intel BOXDH55TC mATX H55 chipset motherboard. To keep with the low power theme, I also ordered some G.SKILL Ripjaw DDR3 that runs at 1.5v.

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