Athlon II X2 250u?

[tucansam]

I have two LGA 775 boards here, and a handful of CPUs (e2140, e6300, e6600).  I had considered buying an e3200 (low power dual core celeron) for the build, but did some experimenting last night, and with 4GB RAM, I can't get any of the above mentioned combos to come in under 50w idle.  That's without disks.  That's MB, CPU, and RAM.  No fans.  And that's idle (sitting at BIOS screen).

 

I am hoping to build a server that comes in MUCH lower than that... And was looking at the Athlon II X2 250u (25w tdp) CPU. 

 

I need an upgradable socket... I have an untangle box running on an Atom and I love it, but for this server, with the evolution of unraid, I want to keep the board semi-upgradable for future add-ons. 

 

Can anyone speak to the Celeron e3200 vs the Athlon II X2 250u?  As I already have the LGA 775 MBs I may go with the Celeron; then again, a cheap AM3+ MB on Newegg is $60 these days, which isn't a lot to pay for the addition of DDR3 memory, an extra SATA port or two, etc.  And 25w tdp for the Athlon vs 65w for the Cereron, is appealing.  Athlon has more L2 cache, Celeron has faster clock...

 

Additionally, all three of the 775 MBs I have laying around here have either X4500 or X4500HD graphics; I believe the NB chipset is pulling a lot of power also.  Wondering what NB chipset (in both LGA 775 and AM3) would be the best for lower power use...

 

Comments?

 

Thanks

[tucansam]

Well the CPU arrived.  I was hoping for lower power consumption, but the 250u in its MB pulls 50w average at idle.  The two LGA775 boards I tested (with MUCH faster CPUs) also pulled 45-50w each.....

 

Dangit.