Well had a walk to the deep dungeons of my cellar this weekend and found 2 other mainboards

, I've used a few years ago.
1.) An AMD K6-2 450 MHz with a Gigabyte GA5AA MB
2.) An Intel Pentium II 333 MHz with a QDI-Brilliant I MB
Both need an additional network and graphics card as they don't have this onboard.
I'm a little bit unsure about the power consumption/performance of these systems in compare to an EPIA 5000 mini ITX system.
In
http://www.mini-box.com/Power.pdf I found:
EPIA 5000 Power Consumption
Running Network Applications 11.32W
Idle 9.64W
EPIA M E6000 power consumption
Running Network Applications 18.17W
Idle 16.21W
On
http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm I found for Intel and AMD CPUs:
Duron-1.0G
Typical Power Dissipation 42.4W
Maximum Power Dissipation 46.1W
K6-2-450AFX
Typical Power Dissipation 11.3W
Maximum Power Dissipation 18.8W
PII-333 (6-5-2)
Maximum Power Dissipation 20.6W
So at first sight, the K6 or the PII don't look so much worse than an EPIA M E6000 i.e. But that is probably not a fair comparison, because the AMD/Pentium systems also consume power for the MB, the graphics card, the network card. Any one knows, to which total power consumption that might sum up?
And concerning performance? I expect both the K6 and PII system to be slower than an EPIA 5000 system. Not only because of the lower CPU speed but as well because of the slower bus of the PII (66 MHz) and the slower IDE interface of the MBs. What is your opinion.
And as for the other route, Tibors suggested, to buy the cheapest fanless EPIA mini-ITX board (e.g. the EPIA 5000). The recommendation for the mini-ITX PSUs from
http://www.mini-box.com is helpful, I didn't know about them so far. Thanx. What case do you suggest? Currently I want to put a single 80 GB Maxtor 3.5" drive into the box (a spare one from a PVR; very quite and ran without a case fan in the PVR!), but would like to have a second 3.5" bay for future expansion. I thought about a Morex Venus 668/669 but heard the fans would be really loud. Most cases come with an internal PSU, so you waste money if you buy such a case and replace the PSU with an DC-DC/external combo from mini-box.com i.e.. Any other suggestions?
Or going the cheap route and put a really quite ATX PSU (do they consume notably more power in idle mode than a DC-DC/external combo i.e.) into a spare midi tower. Definitely not as nifty as a mini-ITX case but probably a safer solution especially with 2 x 3.5" drives than trying to put all the stuff (fanless ITX-board + 2x 3.5" hd) into a small and best fanless mini-ITX case.
Any can recommend such a system (fanless ITX-board + 2x 3.5" hd + mini ITX case, preferable fanless), or advice against this, because he has blown his system.
Really like to here your opinion.
Cecco