Hi all, I have been reading SPCR articles and reviews for a long time, but never posted in the forums because I have note had a build project to work on for several years.

I have pouring over articles lately because I am getting ready to build a diy WHS. I picked up a Antec P180 Mini on black friday for a price that was too good to pass up. Now I am starting to pick the components. I have been over to We got served and AVS and read a lot of blogs on whs build projects, but SPCR really goes into way more depth and focuses on the aspects I am most concerned about:
- energy efficiency
- noise levels

So as I research I hopefully will be posting more to leverage ya'lls expertise.

I am excited to build in the p180 mini. My last diy was several years ago in a vanilla micro atx.

My first realization in this process is the lack of ATX sized PSU's that are in the 200-275 watt range that are 80+ and relatively quiet. From what I read, I could probably get by with a Pico style psu, but that seems silly to have such a little sucker in the p180 mini with its nice psu chamber. But really, if my system is idling around 50-60 watts, it'd be nice to not have a 400 watt wasting energy.

Thanks all,
wickchucker

Any decent 80+ PSU will still be pretty close to 80% efficient in the ~100W range that most small WHS will run.

A low-power 45W Athlon II CPU paired with an 760/780/785G chipset should run you below the 80W range at idle when paired with couple low power hard drives.

My WHS, runs a 780G mobo with a 45W Athlon X2 4850e and 6 HDDs (some 5400rpm, some 7200rpm) runs around 70-80W at idle. I've only seen it max out at 110W.

To followup on jhoffma's post, my WHS is using a 45W BE-2300 on a 760G board, a 640GB WD Blue and a 1TB WD Green and idles around 48W.

Get something like the Corsair 400W and you have room for my hard drives...which you will need when you start dumping all your DVDs onto the machine