In our office we have a development machine which runs all our websites in development along with a number of other applications. This computer is powered 24/7 and consumed considerable energy. The plan was to build a new faster machine that used a fraction of the energy.
The requirements were large storage (1T byte), 4G ram, capability to drive a large DVI panel for developers and a large number of USB ports. In addition we used an ADSL router which itself consumed 8 watts so using an ADSL USB model plugged into this machine would save further energy. Originally the server had raid disks, but the choice was made to backup regularly and use a single disk to save energy.
It’s worth noting that units using small power adapters have poor load factors and even if they consume a small amount of energy the effective transformer losses at the local substation due to poor load factors increase losses – so eliminating additional system components saves more energy than you expect.
The chosen components were:-
- ASUS AT3N7A-I motherboard – this is a dual core atom motherboard with a nvidia ION chipset providing exceptional graphics (DVI connector) and low power consumption. In it’s mini-itx form factor it also reduces space requirements.
- ST31000528AS Seagate 1TB SATA HDD – This is the seagate low power version, and performed better than expected.
- 4G Kingston RAM – Chose a manufacturer that offered a lower power device, there is a vast variation in power consumption of memory devices.
- Noah Mini-ITX Case – Silver/Black – this case had in integral DC-DC adaptor and required no additional fans. It was strongly constructed and had a range of front panel connectors.
- Speedtouch 330 USB Modem – this modem is a third generation speedtouch modem, and is well supported in linux and consumed minimal power.
- Ubuntu Linux OS – I’m a Unix developer, so using windows would have been madness – but Unix has a smaller memory footprint and lower CPU utilisation on average. In addition it’s easier to run a large number of Unix applications in parallel than on a Windows system as the library loading, and configuration file separation facilitate better isolation of applications.
Most of these components were purchased from LinITX in the UK who helped with the case choice.
The large number of cables feed all the office printers, scanners etc along with the USB ADSL modem.
Further power savings were made by turning off all unused devices (printers scanners etc).
The final power consumption was less than 35 watts, which considering how much work this machine is doing is remarkable. It is running ubuntu Karmic, awaiting the release of 10.04 LTS (the 8.04 version did not support the new nvidia graphics properly out of the box).
Hey mate, thanks for sharing but this page doesn’t format correctly in Internet Explorer it is showing only half the page.
I have fixed all the rendering – thanks.
I’ve been offline for a few years – fixed and running new blog!