Home server. electricity consumption

php-fox

Hi all.
I'll be installing a small machine next week at home to serve the purpose of a home and remote server.
It's very basic. Pentium 4 processor (3.2 GHz), M-ATX motherboard. 1 IDE hard drive and a 300 watt power supply.
I'll be running SVN, FTP and Apache on it, and may be some other services as mysql. Its purpose is to serve few people I work with on different projects.

How much in terms of electricity bill do you think it's gonna work out. The machine is probably going to work 24x7. I can't imagine it being too expensive, any suggestions?

riptide

Damn all. I'd say about 120 watts from the machine. Now, then what monitor would you have on it? That would be significant if kept on all the time. And also I'll assume that the graphics card is integrated onto the MB?

PogMoThoin

riptide wrote: »

Now, then what monitor would you have on it?

Monitor on a server? What you on about?

riptide

Screen! LCD, or CRT monitor will be additional power usage.

Anti

riptide wrote: »

Screen! LCD, or CRT monitor will be additional power usage.

Which should only be turned on if there is a problem and you cant connect to it remotly

I would say with those specs it wont use much power at all, 100W max at load unless you decide to throw in a load of scsi drives. To save further power you can go into the bios and turn on the cpu power saving features. And then within windows (power management) you can set the hdd to spin down after say 1 hours worth of inactivity.

riptide

well.... remember now that this is a P4. A P4 541 3.2Ghz will use 84W at load. I'm going to say 5W for HD, and 25W for Board (assuming onboard graphics) and ignore other minor things. Then I'll throw in a 80% efficiency rate for the PSU and that'll bring it up close to 120-130W at load.

Course it could be a P4 Northwood, Prescott or a ,P4 EE .

Anti

True, but it should average out at 100W or so, as the cpu wont be under 100% load 24/7 unless he decides to fold on it too.

riptide

Anti wrote: »

True, but it should average out at 100W or so, as the cpu wont be under 100% load 24/7 unless he decides to fold on it too.

Nicely done. And since we're getting a new machine to the boards.ie team we'll under state the Wattage used on purpose and say.... 50W. :D

So Pog. 50W it is when you use it to fold aswell, and 100W (average) if you don't fold. Whats it going to be?

vibe666

if it's not being used heavily and you're concerned about power consumption but are on a budget, a cheap second hand first gen centrino laptop would be a good compromise.

I'm hoping to set myself up very soon with a 1.5 ghz centrino dell d600 laptop as a server at home so I don't have to keep a desktop machine on 24/7 for my web server etc. and suck too much electricity or produce too much noise/heat.

you can use a 320gb drive in it if you need a lots of space, and there's even a caddy on ebay for an additional laptop drive of any size, so you could have up to 600gb of usable internal hdd space if required.

I'm actually using one as a laptop now with NHC (Notebook Hardware Control) on it and when I'm just surfing the net or emailing etc. the cpu drops to 600mhz to conserve power and with two new'ish batteries (additional one in the media bay, again from ebay) I was getting a full 7-8 hour day out of it between charges, so it's fairly economical on juice.

I've used the same laptop occasionally as a file server streaming divx's to my TV's media player and it works flawlessly so it's well able for it.

Jonathan

Assuming:
100W power consumption
30 day month
14c/kWh (currently 13.39c+vat iirc)

0.1kWh * 744 hours * 0.14c = €10.416 per month.

php-fox

I am using http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SL7PW this P4. 540
jmccrohan, thanks for approximation. I would say that's the heavy load scnerio. My load scenario won't even use 1% of the power

screen! LCD, or CRT monitor will be additional power usage.

no idea, what the author meant here. Probably he didn't know himself I'll use my TV to set up the OS, and thats it. From then on, I'll be using remote connection.
vibe666, I don't feel like using laptops as servers. They are easy to overheat, and have greater fail rate. I kinda want to set this thing up once and forget about it really, without babysitting it every few weeks

Jonathan

php-fox wrote: »

I would say that's the heavy load scnerio. My load scenario won't even use 1% of the power

Just you know 1% cpu load does not equate to 1% of the 100W being used.;)

Anti

84w is what that cpu draws at full pelt. So id say 100W max is what your looking at. Just remember to use the powersaving features i reccomended above. Can elongate the lifespan of some of the harware like the harddrives.

PogMoThoin

riptide wrote: »

Screen! LCD, or CRT monitor will be additional power usage.

If it had a screen then it would be a pc not a server

I've got a home server, used a screen with it for the first hour but once the operating system was installed i now connect remotely to it. It runs Ubuntu server which doesn't give you a desktop GUI anyway by default and lands you straight into the command terminal