Atom based home server?

[Zadock]

Saw a review of gigabytes atom board offering and it got me thinking that I could make a discreet rig with one of these and make a very simple home server with one and it'd use very little juice.

Anyone else thought about this? wonder if it'd be cheaper than buying say an EEE Box?

...its all by the by though, need to buy a house first! then worry about filling it with gadgets

[Funkstar]

It all depends what you want from the "server".

A basic NAS box would work well with an Atom CPU. The previous favourite for this was one of the VIA Epia based boards. I'm not sure how they compare with Atom for price, preformance and power requirments these days.

What you will probably find though is that building one yourself will be more expensive than buying an Eee Box. For example, mini cases for these baords are surprisingly expensive, especially for nice ones.

[Zadock]

Good point on the price, I think the EEE Boxes are going to be around the £150 - £200 mark...

So you don't think it would be suitable for anything beyond NAS then? not even perhaps hosting a server for a few players on an old game? e.g. the open source diablo 2 realm soft, I forget what its called, I stumbled across a few months ago.

[Funkstar]

No idea what you need for games servers. Isn't an Atom about the same processing power as a Celeron of about half the clockspeed?

My Thecus N5200Pros use 1.5GHz Celerons for 5 drive RAID-5. They can quite happily run other services too though, SqueezeCenter, Twonky, BitTorrent Clients, etc.

[DanceswithUnix]

Can't Mini-ITX boards be mounted in a standard uATX case? That gives plenty of choice and you need *some* space for adding hard drives.

How about a combination of:
smallish case

and

laptop drive raid rack

for coolness

[Funkstar]

Thats true, I was forgetting you can use a regular case.

It all depends what you want from it. There is every chance you can actually build a cheaper uATX system than you can mini-ITX.

And if you under-volt or under-clock a base Intel or AMD processor, you might well get down to a reasonable power consumption level, especially when you compair pricing and performance.

[this_is_gav]

We need MicroATX Atom boards. HTPCs with GPU accelerated decoding would surely be another prime market for these.

[Webby]

The real problem with the atom mini-itx boards is that the CPU uses ~4W and the chipset 945 uses about 45W which makes it a bit of a farce really. The atom was originally announced with its own chipset which was north bridge south bridge every other bridge you can think of all rolled into one and was nice and power efficient but I have yet to see a board which actually makes use of it.

Still it should be sufficient for most low throughput server requirements. You can get Intels own board for ~£50 so it prices up very well against Via's offerings and would be cheeper than most uATX boards and CPU also remember that most ITX cases while looking expensive come with a PSU so that adds a bit to the price.

On the other hand £60 would get you a uATX motherboard and a duel core Celeron which would blow the socks off the atom processing wise. Power draw wise I think the DC Celerons are 65W but if they actually draw that or not I don't know.

Either way mini-ITX is very cool, but is expensive.

[Lourdes]

You'll find that you spend far more going for low power kit than you'd save on your electricity bill. And if you're thinking of doing it for environmental reasons then it's greener to reuse or buy old components.