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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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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I have decided to post a little roadmap of what’s next on the site. I am a list making person, so this will hopefully keep me goal oriented. The next few weeks I will be focusing on some Windows Home Server add-in reviews and guides, some Linux/ OpenSolaris on Hyper-V guides, and some hardware testing. Other potential thoughts I have are to write up how to get decent network performance from a WHS (i.e. over 90MB/s which it seems like there are people who can’t figure this out). I may also move into trying some ESXi virtualization guides, some FreeBSD/ OpenSolaris ZFS guides, and some hardware reviews and benchmarks.

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