Low Power (when idle) Home Server

[ger001]

Hi folks,

 

as my home server that mostly runs idle but sometimes needs some CPU power (mostly but not only single core) I currently run an old laptop with

• a P8400 Dual Core CPU
• 4GB of RAM
• 2 HDDs running in a soft raid 1

This draws between 10W and 15W idle and up to 40W under load (measured at the wall).

Now sometimes this thing is just a bit too slow for my liking and I've though about replacing it. The problem is that I'm mainly interested in the idle power consumption of components (mostly mainboard, memory, cpu) but you never find anything about that. So I have basically no idea what to look for when building such a machine.

 

Things I've considered:

• Pentium N3000 series: 4 cores seem nice but the cores seperately seem to be slower that what I currently have. So this doesn't fit my needs.
• Athlon 200GE (maybe 240GE - maybe even some Ryzen 3?): seems to be faster but no idea about power consumption and also how do I choose a board that doesn't draw much power?
• Raspberry Pi 4: possible indeed but I fear it to be too slow - also 4GB of RAM may not be enough in the future (It's affordable though) and USB drives seem a bit off to me.
• another old but more recent laptop: often does only have 1 SATA port

I'm willing to got up to 20W when idle but no more than that.

 

So, any ideas what I should look out for when building such a system?

[WereCatf]

11 minutes ago, ger001 said:

So, any ideas what I should look out for when building such a system?

There are plenty of devices similar to the Intel NUC (I, for example, have an Up Squared) that would probably fit the bill. There are plenty of similar devices on eBay and Aliexpress, if you wanna go with a non-brandname device as well.