Ultra Low (idle) Power Home Server? Suggestions?

[Venner]

Hey all.

I'd like to put together a small home Linux server that will be on 24/7 and mostly serve light duty; lightweight web server, non-transcoding PLEX server, an Asterisk voip gateway for a couple of vintage phones, a few other things. And then a small-ish game server that complicates things a bit.

Thus, here's where I have two competing priorities and I'd like to ask for any suggestions, ideas, or creative alternatives.

(1) Ultra Low Idle Power - The lower the better. <10 watts idlea would be ideal. I currently live in Hawaii, and one of the costs of paradise is extreme electricity prices. Generally about 0.30-0.35 per kWh, but rates can flirt with 0.50 per kWh during peak times. Yeah, I know -- holy moley. Can't just leave a big bad beast on all the time like I did in the Midwest.

(2) Game Server - I would like to host a couple of persistant private games for a group of friends (say, 8-10 players), notably Ark: Survival Evolved and 7 Days to Die. These aren't terribly well multi-threaded and definitely benefit from high single-core performance and high TDP parts.

If it were just #1, I'd look at simply getting something like an efficient Atom CPU / mobo combo and a pico psu, or any number of small-form-factor solutions. My PLEX drives are in a separate USB housing that can be turned off to save power when unused, and the server will likely just have one SSD or M.2 drive. No need for non-integrated graphics.

#2 really breaks the ultra-low-power, but I have have a feeling Ark in particular will choke on a low-end CPU. What is sufficient for hosting 8-10 players without stutter, etc? A Celeron? A E3-1200 series Xeon? An i3 (particularly the new coffee lake 8100)? Any of the new Ryzens?

I don't really have much feel, particularly for the integrated-type processors. I generally only follow the high-end, newer CPUs for multi-core rendering & encoding performance.

Ideally, compromise would be < 30 watts idle, and I'm not particularly concerned about consumption under load when many people are playing. Are there perhaps any [readily available] laptop-targeted CPUs that would do the trick? (E.g., great frequency scaling and energy efficiency, but decent performance under load.) Ideas / recommendations please!


I have a target of around $300 as I already have 16Gb (2x8G) of full-size DDR3 and 32Gb (2x16G) of full-size DDR4 currently sitting unused. (Solution recommendations that use SODIMMs are still welcome, but I'd have to adjust budget.)

Thank you in advance --

 

[sinisterDei]

Well, probably not the Ryzens. They are more power hungry in general than their Intel equivalent.

$300 will be tough. My initial thought was something based on Xeon D, since the whole platform is pretty power efficient. But that will almost certainly be beyond your budget.

You might look into something like the i5-7400T or even an i3-7100T. They're very low power variants (slower clocks) but they're still on a standard desktop platform.

Neither will approach an Atom SoC based system power efficiency because the actual H or Z chipset will use a bit of power on their own. On the Xeon D or the Atom systems, they are SoC and don't have a separate chipset, thus lower power usage overall. But the Xeon D is expensive, and the Atom is too low power as you say. Though, I understand the newest Atom systems (C3500 class) are a good bit more powerful than their previous iterations, but they're also not cheap.