Low power CPU/motherboard suggestions for a complete newb

Bag O'Drives · 31. Dezember 2019

Hello people of the OMV forum. I'm currently looking to build myself a home server/NAS as I've got HDDs lying around that all need consolidating into one place so I'm looking to buy a bunch more (currently looking at something like 8 8TB drives) and sticking them in a SilverStone CS380. As this will take an ATX/MicroATX/MiniITX motherboard board I've got lots of options, too many options. I've built gaming PCs before and that's fairly easy as you just buy what ever's fastest in your budget but for this I'll be wanting something that's low power as it'll be on 24/7 and as it will be doing nothing more than serving up videos via Samba and running SnapRAID I guess it doesn't need to be that powerful CPU wise.

Basically it boils down to what CPU should I be looking at that's low power usage, Intel or AMD? And then what kind of clock speed would I need? And what would then be a good motherboard for that CPU?

fraxor · 3. Januar 2020

Why don't buy an onboard CPU?

I have considerate this in my build (j5005). but at the end for the same costs, i went with an AMD Ryzen 3 1200 combined with a
ASUS Prime B450M-A. So i'm able now to stream 4k without a problem and in future i can still upgrade my CPU if needed.
Power consumption should be quite low as well.

kirkdis · 4. Januar 2020

Let's take fraxors asus proposal. This one will consume around 20-30W (depending on what additional hardware and cpu you add).

Btw it is hard to find boards which provide 8 Sata ports natively so you need to add an extention card.

Further a 8TB drive (e.g. a Seagate Ironwolf) is around 8-10W.
You see the drives will use more than double of the consumption of your board.

As you explain the Nas is serving only videos so I assume that it is not needed the whole day.

If it should be low consumption you have think about sending your drives into sleep while you are not using it which will save most energy of the setup but results in reduced lifetime. It is a tightrope and you have to devide yourself what you want and how your habits are, based on that choose your hardware.

Hope that helps a little...

elf55 · 15. Januar 2020

Take a look at https://kobol.io. The Kool64 model was just released, which is probably the one to buy now.

kirkdis · 15. Januar 2020

thanks for the hint. it seems on par with the nanopi M4. Helios and nanopi have exactly the same CPU. A nice feature is the onboard UPS.

the price for the mainboard only is USD 189 which is quite high compared to the nanopi M4.

I expect that the nanopi with the sata hat is more energy-saving than the helios. not much but a few watts. A shame that they not mention in the specs what consumption they have so we have to wait for the early adopters to report values for comparison.

Eryan · 20. Februar 2020

If you are on the market for used parts, you could go with a similar build as what I have (check my signature). I am running an Intel DQ77KB with an i3-3220. The Mainboard has almost everything you could possibly need, a very good BIOS with a wide array of options, dual gigabit, msata, etc. The consumption is around 15W and the performance is more than enough for a home server application. You can run second and third generation Intel CPUs up to a 65W TDP.

Currently I am using 3 hard drives in SnapRaid plus one SSD for OS. The Mainboard alone supports up to 4 hard drives plus one msata drive. Additional drives can be plugged via a PCI-e expansion card.

Sent from my POCO F1 using Tapatalk

Jetzt mitmachen!