Green PC - Beyond TV Server

[alm99]

Anyone ever built a low power consuming BTV Server? I want to minimize the amount of juice my current BTV server is consuming to help my wallet.

[blaze818]

if you have a 400 watt power supply that means running your server is taking up about the same ammount of energy as leaving 4 lights on. and thats if your using full power of the power supply. i honestly dont think that if you built a low power consumption server you wouldnt notice any difference in you electric bill

[DevilDog]

blaze818 is onto something there. The difference between an energy efficient PC and one not is maybe the difference between having one light on vs. two.

The #1 thing to minimize the juice your existing PC uses is to make sure it is on standby when it is not in use.

For replacing/building new, there are a more "greener" PC components than ever before. However, most are not so green as to make replacing for the sake of energy efficiency worthwhile.

If you are going to be replacing or building new anyway, then look at the AMD 780g chipset motherboards or the NVIDIA 8200 series motherboards. Both have solid onboard video capability and are energy efficient. Add an AMD 4850e/4450e/4050e cpu, western digital green power drives, and a power supply with an 80%+ rating, and you'll have a fairly efficient PC.


But if you have a working BTV server, and want to replace it with very green parts just to lower your electric bill, it will take years for the new one to cover the upgrade cost. So my recommendation is to not replace anything for the sake of being more energy efficient, just buy greener parts when you do have a need to upgrade.

That's my two cents - hope it helps.

[gsinpei]

Standby will save energy. LCG3 SMART STRIP POWER STRIP can turn off peripherals when computer is off or in standby low power mode.
This would be good if someone wanted to save energy on external devices like hard drives or satellite receivers, etc... just have to make sure that the satellite receiver turns back on with the power or find a way to send/program a power on command after coming out of standby.

[Darkk]

One of the things I can tell you is consolidate your servers into less machines. Right now I got BeyondTV on a Windows 2003 server with 2 gigs of ram along with lots of hard drives and RAID 5 setup (see sig). I use 380 watt Antec Earthwatts power supply and it is very energy efficient. It only draws slightly under 100 watts which is acceptable for 24/7hr use.

I may have plans in the future to have a dedicated BeyondTV server / link and move the fileserver functions to something like a Windows Home Server or Linux NAS.

I have a pile of old motherboards and processors but they're old technology that consumes too much power at idle so I don't use em.

Darkk