http://www.anandtech.com/show/7737/10w-bay-traild-coming-to-market-from-gigabyte-and-biostar

 

With the hard drives off, my  headless 1156 i3 sucks 50 watts.

With all drives spun down, my headless 1155 i3 only sucks 33W at the wall.  The IB, and especially Haswell, architectures are incredibly power efficient.

 

I'd be surprised if these new Atom mobos idled below 20W but they may very well go lower than that.

I bought the Gigabyt J1800N-D2H, it should arrive within a week. Pairing it with a controller and 4xWD Green 3 GB drives. Will give feedback when I put everything together.

My Atom-based server (SuperMicro X7SPA-D525) draws just under 20w when all the drives are spun down.  The TDP for a D525 is 13 watts ... so the motherboard accounts for the rest of the power draw (plus the CPU isn't likely drawing 13w at idle).    I'd be surprised if a 10w TDP CPU system draws much less than that ... but it might get down to 17-18w.

 

 

My Atom-based server (SuperMicro X7SPA-D525) draws just under 20w when all the drives are spun down.  The TDP for a D525 is 13 watts ... so the motherboard accounts for the rest of the power draw (plus the CPU isn't likely drawing 13w at idle).    I'd be surprised if a 10w TDP CPU system draws much less than that ... but it might get down to 17-18w.

 

There are a few problems with the older Atoms when it comes it ubber low power usage at idle.  The first one is the chipset most of the time draws more power than the chip its self.  This was solved in 2012 with the system on chip (SoC) series CLover Trail.  The 2nd problem is unless you have a power supply that is 4th gen Haswell ready, It will not be very power efficient below 40 watts power draw.

 

I have no doubt that you could have a system idle at 5-10 watts with the new baytrail  chips and just the onboard sata controler and a newish power supply.

My Atom-based server (SuperMicro X7SPA-D525) draws just under 20w when all the drives are spun down.  The TDP for a D525 is 13 watts ... so the motherboard accounts for the rest of the power draw (plus the CPU isn't likely drawing 13w at idle).    I'd be surprised if a 10w TDP CPU system draws much less than that ... but it might get down to 17-18w.

 

There are a few problems with the older Atoms when it comes it ubber low power usage at idle.  The first one is the chipset most of the time draws more power than the chip its self.  This was solved in 2012 with the system on chip (SoC) series CLover Trail.  The 2nd problem is unless you have a power supply that is 4th gen Haswell ready, It will not be very power efficient below 40 watts power draw.

 

I have no doubt that you could have a system idle at 5-10 watts with the new baytrail  chips and just the onboard sata controler and a newish power supply.

 

THis is spot on. Getting an efficient power supply below 20w is extremely difficult. When I have some spare money I'm getting a picopsu since that has around 80% efficiency around the 20w mark, while normal ATX struggle to break past 50-60% efficiency.

 

Also, the new atoms support VT-x, and are much faster per w (over 100% faster in some benchmarks) than the previous series.

Right, due to newborn arriving, I haven't really been able to get this going until today. I put the system together with the following hardware:

 

Case: Node 304

Mobo/CPU: J800N-D2H  (J1800 dual core Bay Trail processor running at 2.8Ghz)

Memory: 4GB 1333Mhz (1.35V SO-DIMM, will upgrade to 8GB if needed for Arch VM)

SATA controller: 4xSATA KALEA-INFORMATIQUE PCIE 1x

HDDs: 2 x 3TB Toshiba HDD (5900rpm drives, the Toshiba 7200rpm drives offer better performance and are 5 euros cheaper, but consume more power and are louder)

SSD: 120GB Crucial M500 (not in the array, will run Arch from it)

 

First off, the most important thing for me when putting this together is that (in order) it runs silent, consumes very little power and that has decent performance. The case looks fantastic with a brushed metal finish. It's also quite small so it sits under the TV. It has space for 6 3.5" drives and it comes with 3 fans. As the system is so power efficient, I only connected the 140mm fan and it's inaudible from 0.5m away.

 

The mobo/cpu offers impressive performance for the price, and as it's passively cooled, so there's no extra noise. As you can see from the picture below, at the moment it's doing a parity check at 135MB/s, so it's no slouch. It also has decent integrated graphics and video/compressing extensions, together with VT-x, so it basically offers a lot in a small package. And ofcourse, it has a TDP of 10W for the full mobo/cpu, so it's very power efficient. I can't tell you exactly how efficient it is as my kill-a-watt meter decided to die recently, but I'll get another one soon and post some results. One thing about this mobo, it comes with BIOS version F2, which does not support Unraid or pretty much any other linux distrubition (or Windows 7), so to get it to work, you need to upgrade the bios to version F3 as detailed here. Once that is done, Unraid works very well.

 

As for the HDDs/controller, the mobo only supports PCIE 1x (2.0) which gives a total bus speed of 500MB/s, which together with the 2 Sata ports on the mobo is enough for me as the case only supports 6 HDDs in total. I'm starting with 2 Toshiba 3TB HDDs (although weirdly, on the GUI it shows as 1 being a Hitachi for some reason...). I chose them because they were on discount, 90 euros each (which is around $125). They have good reviews in terms of reliability, noise and power efficiency and are much cheaper than the 3TB WD Red drives. I will be getting a 3TB WD Red to run as the parity drive soon. I plan on getting more drives as needed together with the Unraid license. In addition, I also have an SSD which I will be running an Arch VM from. It will not be part of the array as I don't want it to keep the disks spinning unnecessarily.

 

Here it is formatting and running a parity check on the drives:

 

 

 

Will update when I get the kill-a-watt meter.

It'll be interesting to see the actual power consumption with a Kill-a-Watt.

 

Note that 10w is the TDP of the CPU => NOT the board + CPU

 

... but I'd still expect a total consumption with drives spun down or under 20 watts.    As a comparison, my D525-based (Atom) system idles right at 20w, with a CPU that's rated at 13w TDP.

 

I used this power supply board with a Gateway power brick in my HTPC and the idle/low use power consumption dropped from 42W to 30W compared to the generic power supply that came in the case. He sometimes sells kits with a brick too. I'm thinking it's a pretty efficient supply.

 

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/130W-mini-ITX-ATX-Power-DC-DC-converter-Pico-PSU-Y2-/181377974763?pt=PCA_UPS&hash=item2a3af841eb

It'll be interesting to see the actual power consumption with a Kill-a-Watt.

 

Note that 10w is the TDP of the CPU => NOT the board + CPU

 

... but I'd still expect a total consumption with drives spun down or under 20 watts.    As a comparison, my D525-based (Atom) system idles right at 20w, with a CPU that's rated at 13w TDP.

As noted above, the chipset is now integrated in that total 10W TDP. In addition, the latest Bay Trail CPUs support Speedstep, which the old versions did not. There is definitely some potential for reducing the real world power consumption *IF* the rest of the motherboard is designed with power consumption in mind. Even if it isn't, I still bet we see a decent drop.

And ofcourse, it has a TDP of 10W for the full mobo/cpu, so it's very power efficient.

 

That's actually not true.  The new "system on a chip" processors DO have an integrated chipset, but that is NOT the entire motherboard ... it's just that one chip [which has both chipset & CPU integrated].    It still allows a very efficient system -- as I noted earlier, it's getting to such a low power level that the inefficiency of your power supply is likely contributing an appreciable percentage of the power draw.

 

Drawz's comment is more accurate:

 

... the chipset is now integrated in that total 10W TDP.