After getting numerous power bills at my old place that were making my eyes bug out, I decided to take some action during the move to my new place, and build a brand new server from scratch, with the mindset of saving as much power as possible, but not sacrificing performance too much.

I was able to pull it off for about $300 worth of parts from NewEgg. Here’s what I chose and why:

• PC Chips V21G VIA motherboard. Features a CPU soldered right onto the motherboard (no upgrades.) The CPU is a VIA C7, a low power alternative to Intel/AMD chips. It also comes with onboard video and sound, always a bonus for server applications. It looks like NewEgg isn’t selling this particular C7 board anymore, but you can find others.
• Corsair ValueSelect 1 gigabyte (2 x 512MB) 240–pin DDR2 SDRAM. Cheap RAM that works great. It’s not ECC, but I’ve never really needed ECC anyway. Not for this sort of thing.
• Rosewill RV200 SFX 200 watt power supply. It doesn’t fit in a standard ATX case (it’s smaller) but my custom duct-tape solution to hold it up works fine. Very efficient. It’s getting harder to find lower-wattage power supplies… but really, do we need 700+ watt power supplies yet?
• Two Seagate Barracude 7200.9 120 gigabyte, 7200 RPM drives. At the time, these were the best bargain for space vs. cost. Not sure what would be a better buy now. I have mirrored them via software RAID (in Windows 2003 Server) and they work great.

My old server was AMD-based, and would use approximately 200 watts while “idle”. My new server? 55 watts. Wow. Now it’s going to cost me the same as leaving a 60 watt light bulb on all month, which is just a couple of dollars, compared to tens of dollars I was spending before.

Another side benefit to lower wattage is less heat being output by the power supply/CPU itself. My home office space is considerably cooler than it was before.

And the speed? I notice a slight difference compared to my AMD, but nothing really to complain about. My server’s hosting internal project files, as well as public websites, such as my journal.

Not bad at all. Let me know if you have any questions.