BUILD Help with hardware selection for Mini ITX build

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Tom_

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Me too. There's no scrub running. Only plugin is crashplan and I have dnsmasq running in a jail. Services enabled are ssh, SMART and nfs.
 

MrToddsFriends

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Well, I do have three Noctua fans in there. 2 × 92 mm and 1 × 140 mm. PWM doesn't really work on the SuperMicro board so I had to set it to "Heavy I/O Mode" in the BIOS, which means the fans are running a lot faster than they need to be, but they still shouldn't draw more than ~2 W each I think?

ipmitool is your friend. In my system two 92mm Noctua NF-A9 PWM (with Low-Noise-Adapters) are running at 300 ... 400 rpm used as font fans.

For each of your Noctua PWM fan, execute a command like this (replace "FAN1" with the designations of the connectors your Noctas are attached to):
# ipmitool sensor thresh "FAN1" lower 100 200 300

Values shown here for Lower Non-Recoverable, Lower Critical and Lower Non-Critical thresholds are somewhat radical, but reliably prevent IPMI alarms because of low fan speed for me. After that, fan mode setting Standard Speed in IPMI can be set.

I don't have measured numbers about power consumption, but 100W sounds very much for me, compared how cool my system is running (with only 3 HDDs and slow speed fans).


MrToddsFriends
 

Tom_

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Hey, great tip on ipmitool! That had been bugging me a bit, thanks.

Re. power usage, I'd be very happy to hear any suggestions on how to chase down the problem because I'm stumped. I just disabled USB3 in the BIOS which has saved me 5 W, so I'm down to a paltry 95 now :D
 

Tom_

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Well this is awkward. I reset the watt-meter and now it's reporting 45 W. I'm a clown, sorry everyone. I feel like deleting my posts but I'll leave them there for others' amusement.
 

sremick

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Well this is awkward. I reset the watt-meter and now it's reporting 45 W. I'm a clown, sorry everyone. I feel like deleting my posts but I'll leave them there for others' amusement.
That makes more sense and is in-line with my system and measurements. I can't break 100W unless I artificially stress the system to 100% but it never gets anywhere near that in real-world use.
 

titan_rw

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Both my nas's idle at around 150w. Both have 12 drives though. I'm not really concerned. Actual power usage is such a small portion of your utilities bill it doesn't make a huge difference.
 

paylesspizzaman

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@Tom_
nope, no drives attached, it's getting even better/worse: they even disabled the Marvell ports... same result - because you can't cut off the PCIe-Switch. That very switch wouldn't be necessary if they had used Atoms integrated GBE-Controller; this way the board has one PCIe device too much to talk to the Atom-CPU and the Switch jumps in place. Which kind of leads us back to what @Ericloewe said: they're still learning how to build server boards.
The article then refers to the Supermicro board which they have tested in 2013 (2013/23).

@cyberjock
nah.. unfortunately, it's pay for the paper or pay for the pdf (1,50 EUR, http://www.heise.de/artikel-archiv/ct/2014/01/056_Serverboard)

Not that I now anything about motherboards, but I was looking at the system block diagram for the AsRock C2750D4i, it appears they are using 14 lanes off the Atom Chip. The Supermicro A1SAM-2750F appears to use 13 lanes. What is interesting is that according to Intel's spec sheet, the C2750 offers 16 lanes. What am I missing, where are the other PCIe lanes being used?
 

Ericloewe

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The PCI-e controller on the Avotons doesn't allow for so many connected devices, even though lanes are available.
 
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