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Going green

I've recently swapped my old server in the attic for a brand new Intel D510MO setup and wanted to share the experience. Since these are green times and electricity is damn expensive here in Denmark I decided that it was time to go green. Some years ago I ran my server on a Via mini-itx board back when they first showed up. I remember it being quite slow, but doable. After a year or so I went for an AMD64 3500 setup, which I underclocked to save power. Still with two hard disks it used around 100 watts an hour, which is somewhere along 870 Kwh a year - in Denmark that amounts to 1500 Dkkr or roughly 300 dollars a year.

Queue the Intel D510MO

Then one day I stumbled upon this board in the news. The Intel D510MO. With a dual core 1,66 Ghz brand new CPU and everything you would need for a server rig, all built into a tiny motherboard in the mini-itx form factor. Reviews were quite good, power consumption almost rediculously low and the price equally so. I had seveal disks laying around and some DDR2 memory as well. All I needed was the board. Since my old server casing was a huge pile of iron I went for a small footprint instead and ordered the M350 and an external PSU to go.

The M350 casing only takes up 6.2 cm (H) x 19.2 cm (W) x 21 cm (D) which is damn small. Inside you can fit the motherboard, a 2.5" harddisk and a small fan.

You can check out more images here: http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=54

For power I added the picoPSU90 with a 80 watt universal AC/DC adapter.

The Intel D510MO uses so little power that it's passively cooled. If you threw in an SSD disk you would make a completely silent rig - how sweet would that be? I ended up installing a small fan to keep the air flowing inside the case. Since my attic runs quite hot in the summer I thought it was better to be safe than sorry. Besides since it's sitting up there all alone, noise from the fan won't bother anyone (you should have heard the old server :-)

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