Low energy, sad
I’m trying to find a low-energy solution for a decent-performing machine I can use for my weather satellite monitoring and my weather stations. My machines run 24/7, so basically I’m trying to reduce the number of watts I use.
My present machine runs CentOS 7 with Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 running at 2.40GHz. It has 16GB of memory and two NICS bonded, because I need plenty of Ethernet speed for moving the weather satellite images around. It has two 500GB drives with Raid 1 and one 1TB without. The VGA is a NVIDIA GT200 GeForce GTX 260 Dual head for two monitors.
Is there any advice that you can give me, to let me know the necessary specs for a good lowpower quality motherboard, processor, RAM and low-energy PSU to do this? I know this sounds back to front: “Let’s have plenty of power, but not use many watts,” but it would be good to achieve in the long run I think. I suspect your answer will be, “You must be joking!” Francis,WestCork,Ireland Neil says: Yikes, that old Q6600 in itself will consume quite the measure of power – its TDP is 105W. A modern desktop processor will likely half the power (taking into account lower-power DDR4 memory and motherboard chipset) and still provide over double the processing power.
Combine that with (potentially) integrated graphics that’s able to run three displays and with the right motherboard built-in dual NICs. The new AMD Ryzen 5 1600 is likely a good all-round choice to build from scratch, but you’ll need a graphics card on top. On the Intel side for similar performance you’d want a Core i7 7700K. It’s £100 more just for the chip, although it does have integrated graphics. So it does sound like you want to build from scratch then?
I’m not going to be able to specify parts precisely, but I’m happy to point out a few I know of.
Yes, the PSU is important, as a poor 600W PSU will waste 30 per cent of the power, while a good one will waste just 10 per cent or less. Look for the 80 Plus Bronze measure, while a Gold will be worth it in the longer run.
The other option is to consider how you’re handling your data? Is the download part the bit that takes the most time? Could that be handled overnight by a Raspberry Pi, laptop or miniPC box? Do let us know how you got on!