AMD Processor Advice please
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AMD Processor Advice please
11-03-2013 1:44 PM
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I have a Linux PC running Mandriva 2011, 64-bit version.
It has 8Mb DDR2 PC2-5300 RAM (max the board will take).
CPU is a Sempron 140 in an AM2+ socket. The motherboard will take an AM2 or AM2+ CPU
The PC is mainly used as a file server for music, and sometimes runs a Minecraft server. Hence it sits in the corner with no keyboard, mouse, or monitor. I do occasionally VNC to it and do a bit of desktop computing though (I'm writing this on a KDE desktop now).
Am I running it to the best of its ability (mainly for the Minecraft server) or would a cheap processor upgrade be a good idea? If so,any suggestions? I'm kind of looking at £20-£30 on eBay as a rough guide, but I don't really know much about M2/AM2+ sockets (the board will take both).
Cheers
-Dave
You know what a turtle is? Same thing.
Re: AMD Processor Advice please
11-03-2013 3:51 PM
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First thing to do is get a £8 power meter plug to see what your "server" is consuming power wise. My old Athlon system which I was using as a server was idling at between 180 and 200 watts. When I was video encoding it was consuming 280 watts.
Every watt you use equates to around £1 per year on your electricity bill. I soon realised that old power hungry technology was not going to be much good in the long term.
I looked at building my own server using AMD technology but it was just too power hungry. To get the kind of performance I wanted I'd have been using a quad core Athlon which would heat the house quite happily.
I settled on a couple of HP ML110 G7 servers and a N40L microserver. One ML110 is the E3-1220 and the other is the G840 - both idle at around 30-60 watts while the N40L idles at 30-40 watts. With the cashback I got on the servers, they will pay for themselves in under two years jut in power savings alone.
In fact the E3-1220 has so much spare processing capacity, I'm running three seperate servers on it through Virtualbox and turned the other two servers off. One will be kept as a backup (G840) the other (N40L) is being sold to a customer as a fileserver.
In answer to your original question (I assume you have 8Gb ram - not 8Mb ?), run the command "top" from a terminal prompt and see what your overall CPU usage is - if it's running at 100% or close to all the time then you could do with an upgrade.
Re: AMD Processor Advice please
11-03-2013 4:06 PM
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All that time spent on this forum typing "Mbps" has taken it's toll. Yes I did mean 8Gb!
I hasten to add that the MS server only ever has my son & his friends on it (4 at most) and for most of the time only 2 users on the Lan.
I'll give it a hammering later on this evening and see what Top reports. I've already found that the KDE Plasma Desktop running under VNC is a bit of a resource hog.
-Dave
You know what a turtle is? Same thing.
Re: AMD Processor Advice please
11-03-2013 4:21 PM
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I'm about to set up some kind of web filtering / proxy server on it to enable my stepson to be able to browse the web a little more safely and monitor his usage.
Current power consumption looking at the plug with 4 hard drives in and everything running (including the APC UPS) is hovering between 80 and 90 watts
Re: AMD Processor Advice please
11-03-2013 5:47 PM
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This Phenom system idles at around 80W (including a quad TV tuner and GeForce GTX660ti). My home server is based on a Sandy Bridge Core i3 and idles closer to 30W (before adding in hard drives), so is much more power efficient. As the Phenom is my desktop PC, it would take 6 or 7 years for the power savings to recover the costs of upgrading (motherboard + CPU + memory). If it was being used in my home server, the power savings would be more attractive.
Re: AMD Processor Advice please
11-03-2013 6:17 PM
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The price difference between building a server with an Athlon vs a ready build HP Intel server (with cashback) was negligible - in fact it was marginally cheaper to buy a ML110 G7 when the cashback deals were running (G840 was around £120 and the E3-1220 was around £280 with an extra 4Gb ECC ram).
Re: AMD Processor Advice please
11-03-2013 6:21 PM
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Re: AMD Processor Advice please
11-03-2013 6:35 PM
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You know what a turtle is? Same thing.
Re: AMD Processor Advice please
11-03-2013 6:55 PM
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What you'll spend out on the server you'll recoup over the next couple of years in energy savings
Re: AMD Processor Advice please
11-03-2013 11:48 PM
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You could also easily run a couple of virtual machines on it.
"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."
Re: AMD Processor Advice please
13-03-2013 8:57 AM
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You know what a turtle is? Same thing.
Re: AMD Processor Advice please
13-03-2013 11:07 PM
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There are some obvious gaps in my education.
You know what a turtle is? Same thing.
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