I know it's bad form to quote yourself, but anyway...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.
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).