What do I buy for the current most power saving NAS system?

Offloading HDDs and other functions to remote NAS or servers is increasingly popular
matt_garman
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 541
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2004 11:35 am
Location: Chicago, Ill., USA
Contact:

Post by matt_garman » Fri Jun 26, 2009 7:18 am

matt_garman wrote:What do ya'll think about the Biostar A760G motherboard? It appears to have the low-power CPU-friendly 3-phase power (further supported by the newegg reviews which suggest it doesn't support the high-wattage processors).

I can't find any info on whether or not it supports CPU undervolting. (I had a nvidia 7025 based Biostar not too long ago that did not support undervolting, for what that's worth.)

I don't know if this board can break the sub 30 W barrier though.
I know it's bad form to quote yourself, but anyway... :)

Newegg had an open box Biostar A760G, plus a 10% off coupon on all motherboards, so I went ahead and ordered one. I've already got the "benchmark" NAS motherboard, the Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2, along with a BE-2350 CPU. Also on the way is a G2-stepping Sempron LE-1250 CPU. I intend to do some comparisons of these two motherboards, and see how low I can get the idle power consumption on each.

What sold me on the Biostar A760G was reading through the manual, which includes a fair amount of detail on the BIOS. It looks like it does support CPU under-volting. Also, the onboard GPU can be downclocked to 150 MHz, which can only help. Another selling point was explicit ECC RAM support. I know all AMD CPUs support ECC RAM, but non-server motherboards don't often have that feature enabled in the BIOS. At least the Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 doesn't have any ECC options in the BIOS (although that doesn't necessarily mean it's not supported). Finally, there was a "enable headless operation" option in the A760G BIOS. That, combined with the ECC functionality, suggests to me that Biostar may have recognized this board's potential in a server (or maybe I'm just overly optimistic).

Post Reply