Hello.
I'm about to upgrade my existing box (Atom N270) to something more powerful. My requirements are:

• 2x Gb Ethernet
• miniPCIe to hook up WLAN card
• 5 or more SATA ports, at any speed
• enough CPU muscle to run dedicated server for DST without stuttering
• idle power consumption as low as possible given the above

After looking around, I settled for Jetway NF82, an AMD A75-based board. Any words of wisdom/warning here?

I haven't yet decided on the APU - the R-series are a unicorn (no way to get them), so my options are limited to A8-4500M, A6-4400M, and A4-4300M. Assuming that even the lowest of these is sufficient for the workload (is it really? given my experience with running DST DS on the N270, the CPU needs to be at least 3-5 times faster than N270), which one should I get to minimize idle power consumption?
The server will be running completely headless - the console will be redirected to the serial port or similar. Are there any other tricks I can try to push the power consumption further down? Undervolting, disabling the GPU altogether, etc.?

Got burned twice with AMD and definitely not going to challenge your direction towards AMD.
You're running headless, so have a look here to compare the speed of the different CPUs.

Why are you asking specifically about idle power usage? Asking because it is anyway very low and any component has the potential to screw up your expectations => better if you do a component-by-component investigation.

Hi Pearlseattle, thanks for the response.
Can you elaborate? If the issues are limited to problems with GPU drivers (either Catalyst or radeon) I think I can live with that on a headless machine.
The machine is expected to run 24/7 for several years to come, and my experience so far is that routing/running an AP is pretty close to idling for a machine of this performance class. The extra performance is needed strictly for (relatively) brief moments of high NAS utilization (assuming RAID 5/6), and game server execution at adequate performance.
The price of electricity in my area is such that each Watt is ~1€ in annual bill - that isn't too bad, but consider that I also want to keep the machine running on a UPS, at least as a router, during a power outage. I'd like to keep the whole thing (MoBo with everything on it, + 3 HDDs) within 45W, or 30W for everything excluding the HDDs.

Edit - the important question regarding the choice of APU is whether idle power of the quad-core is significantly higher than that of a dual-core APU. What I meant is that if it's likely that dual-core is sufficient for my performance needs, does it make sense to go with quad-core, or does that involve significantly increasing the idle power?
Looking at the prices of those dual-core APUs, I may as well just buy both from 1 shop and find out for myself. :-)

Idle power drain is, I think, more about all the components and the processor architecture (f.i. Bulldozer): not the amount of cores.
If it should function as router too, you might get better latency with more cores. The real wildcard is that game. It sort of depends on how that game is optimized, whether it will run well.
The undervolting is always worth a try, but maybe not available on that MB?

I'm not really either - however, the APU dies, as I understand it, are all natively 4-core, and the 2-core APU models have the extra cores (possibly defective) fused off. This to me, seems like should result in reduced power draw in 2-core models. But like I said, the 2-core APUs are dirt cheap, so I'll get both and find out by experiment. The components are not much up for debate - I already have the HDD's, the consumption of WiFi card is negligible and the rest is all part of the motherboard.
Thanks, I'll remeber to check the game performance and responsiveness with other players when evaluating if I should stick with 2- or 4-core APU.
I thought the abilty to control voltages was only dependent on the CPU/APU, and availability of drivers..? Either way, this is just something I'd look into if it's available, not a requirement.