I'm a hoarder.
I've got a bunch of old PCs in the loft collecting dust.

I'm wondering if I'll see any usability gains in swapping out a SFF pc (Compaq Q2200 - Atom 230 & 1 GB RAM) for an homebuilt desktop (AMD Opteron 185, 3Gb RAM). The system will be running debian headless, as a media and fileserver up in my loft.

Both systems are approaching 10 years old, though the opteron box has been worked hard for most that time, the compaq not so much.

I like the compaq, it's small, quiet (one fan), sips power, and has been ultra-reliable in the two years or so it's been running.

I don't like the fact it's ethernet interface is only 100Mbit and I can't upgrade it as the only card slot has the raid card in it. I've had to compromise the case slightly by remomving the CDR drive and jamming a pair of hard-discs in it's place (it does fit, just) -despite this disc temperatures rarely top 33deg C.

The Opteron box has an Nforce 4 motherboard, which isn't the last name in reliability, but has served it well, I'm a little nervous of how well supported some of the motherboard features will be, but it does have Gigabit networking onboard, as well as 4 ports of sata (albeit only 150MBit). it has a nice compact, full size case I'll use, with lots of drive space, and as a full size ATX board, it's got a few more useful PCIe slots than the SFF board I'm currently using - perhaps a bigger raid card. It will need a video card though.

My concern is with the power draw, the TDP of the Opteron alone is 110W (compared to the Atoms 4W) The loft gets warm in the summer (concrete tile roof) and the increased cooling needed will also have a power and noise penalty.

The thing is, I don't think the current (atom) box is lacking, it runs Mediatomb happily enough for the tv, webmin reports it's mostly idle, or running a at less than 20% cpu utilisation most the time, the only real niggle is the network interface speed.

So, would the faster network interface, processor and better storage mounting be worth the increased heat noise and power draw?

I think I've answered my own question in typing all this out, but I think I'll post this in case any of the wizened souls here have comments that might help me reconsider..

thanks for reading.

Hi,

The total power for the HP is more than 4 W. Do you have a power meter? You can check the wattage for the peripherals and then have a good case for total power but the PSU is rated at 65 W. For the Ethernet you could add a USB interface plus add a external SSD for additional storage.

Do you have a valid reason for replacement of a system that is currently working? Storage needs and Ethernet can be addressed by adding interfaces along with increased storage. It seems the environment needs are met by the Compaq.

If it 'ain't' broke don't fix it!

Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!

Why mess with something that's working well.

I can't see any reason unless you really need faster ethernet.

Power consumption is an issue. The Opteron will not draw 110W continuously, but it is close. Add the fans and hard disks and the power supply effenciency. It will never sleep because it is a server. Assuming the system consumes 100W, this is 8760 hours x 100 W = 876 kWh /year.

To put this in perspective, if you had 1 kW of solar panels installed, these solar panels would produce just enough to compensate the power consumption of your server. In the UK.

It is cheaper to buy a low power Atom barebone which had 1 or 2 Gbit ports if speed is a problem.

For years I am running my home server on Atoms. And I have been throwing away perfectly good mainboards for AMD Athlon an alike. Not that I like that, but buying low-power hardware simply is cheaper.

jlinkels

Hi all, thanks for your thoughts.

@Onebuck - I do have a power meter, though it's a bit of a faff to install and monitor it. I'm sure you're not wrong in that comparing just the TDP of the processors doesn't give a metric on the whole system. I'm not a big fan of external interfaces - in this case they'll be limited by the USB bus speed (USB2.0, so theoretical max of 480Mbps, but actually more like 280), which in potential is quicker than 100mbps LAN, but not much.

@Fatmac - indeed - it's a fair bit of bother for minimal gain. A bit like my car: it may not be quick, but it's adequate for the task at hand.

@Jlinkels - The AMD box, and another old Intel P4 box I have (which doesn't even get considered here) were produced at the peak of CPU thermal inefficiency (IMO), since then things have (thankfully) improved somewhat.

I will look into atom-based barebones systems. The Compaq/HP does have a few shortcomings, but as stated before, it's processing performance appears to be adequate.

And I like buying stuff

I bet that Opteron is a perpetual heatsik. You could easily do media and file serving on an Atom processor.

Check out the Raspberry Pi, it has a whole community behind it with it's own forum.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/

CrowbarHero,

Then you might like to have a look at this Gigabyte Brix Barebones:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-Br...00MOEMZMQ?th=1

The Intel Celeron J1900 is benchmarked at 1862 which is not bad.

Add 4GB of Crucial RAM and SSD:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005LDLV...767431_TE_dp_1

https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-PLU...977GGQKHPH2638