Spotted this Supermicro low-power server board in a shop today:

http://www.supermicro.nl/products/mothe ... .cfm?typ=H

Atom D510 (dual core, hyperthreaded) based with dual Intel gigabit LAN ports. Also has 6 SATA ports and a 4x PCI-e slot.

Only thing is that it's ICH9R chipset based. IIRC not the most efficient chipset.

I can't find much info on this board. Can anyone comment on it's likely power consumption? I have a feeling it will be quite poor due to the chipset.

Well considering it's using the ICH9R for SATA and according to the SPCR thread on Intel chipset power consumption the ICH9R is supposed to use roughly 4.4w of power.

According to this thread:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/atom-d510-d510mo,2507-2.html

the ICH7 would use about 3.3w. The processor is more power hungry now 13W or so vs the 8W on a Atom330 but you also lose the horribly power hungry 945GC chipset.

I would say with all of the components built onto this board you'd be looking at about 25W? I like the fact that it already has dual Intel gigabit and 6 sata, not to mention the 4x pci-e slot for expansion. That little board could be a great Openfiler box. What's the price point on it?

Here's another thread on the motherboard from unRaid:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5133.30

What's depressing is the amount of power that the setup is using with two hard drives. My atom 330 with 3 1TB black drives uses the same amount of power.

Wow, that is pretty bad. Doesn't seem worth it for what you get over the D510M0, and it's a lot more expensive (~250UKP).

My plan was to use HDD power management or maybe hot-swapping. I think it'll just use USB instead. You can completely power down a USB device and disconnect it from the mains, which not only saves power but makes it much more immune to lightning/power surge damage.

Here is some new power consumption information from that same thread (it's been quite active in the last couple of weeks)


Those numbers look a bit more promising, based on the motherboard draw if I added in my 4 x 1TB black drives and a 2.5 laptop drive for booting I'd be sitting at about 70W idle and lower on spindown. Right now I've got 3 Caviar blacks and a 120 WD IDE drive and I'm already at 76W.

Cool board! Pairing the new Atom with the old ICH9R overcomes the prime limitation of the D510MO as server: limited sata ports.

But, if fast disk subsystem speed isn't paramount, you can use a PCI sata controller to add 4 more ports to the D510MO. The Promise SATA300 TX4 controller has unRAID support as well.

I've heard that PCI based SATA cards offer very poor overall performance and you're better off even getting a 1x SATAII PCIe card instead. 133MB on the PCI bus vs 250MB on a PCIe 1x.

The only thing that makes me hesitate is the $229 pricetag here in Canada.

You're totally correct. But sometimes wicked speed isn't necessary or cost-effective. Like if you're building a NAS box, for example. You're going to be limited by your network, by your file transfer protocols, file copy engine peculiarities, etc., so a wicked-fast disk subsystem is not as critical.

unRAID was mentioned before. I have a unRAID server at home. unRAID's write performance is tragic because of how parity calcs work. I rarely get over 45MB/s, even with a PCIe SATA controller (onboard AMD 760G).

Wow I would expect something a bit speedier than that from an interface that can handle 2x the bandwidth. I'm tempted to order one of these boards since I can obtain it through work but that $250 price tag is pretty hefty. I do like the 2 x Intel GB NIC's and the IMPI is a great selling point (no need to hook it up to a monitor, keyboard and mouse unless you can't get connected to it remotely).

It's a limitation of the OS. unRAID's Achilles heel is write performance because parity calculation is a laborious 4-step process. In practice, this doesn't matter for something like a media server (what I use it for). Reads are as fast as any single drive can go. I like unRAID a lot, and knew about the (lack of) write performance.

I just purchased this board (technically the -HF version), and will see how it goes in a fairly stock small server configuration:

* Super Micro SuperServer SYS-5015A-PHF case, motherboard, 200W "Low Noise" PSU
* 3.5" to 2x 2.5" HDD drive bracket
* 2x 2GB G.Skill DDR2-667 SO-DIMMs
* 2x 320GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue 5400 RPM 2.5" SATA

Total cost $550 USD shipped. The SuperMicro case and PSU seem to only have one fan, so I'm hopeful their claims of "low noise" are correct. Of course, it might only be low in comparison to other 1U rackmount servers, so there's a lot of room for subjective interpretation.

I have been using the HF for about a month now. It works as advertised

I get KVM over IP and low power.

Kill-A-Watt: 28W (mobo plus 3 laptop drives plus 80+ power supply)

Old thread, but nonetheless, I'll throw my view on this motherboard:

The reason why it's expensive is because it's loaded with stuff you won't see on most if any similar motherboards (true for most Supermicro motherboards). The board has a real southbridge, ICH9R, which can do RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 and offers 6 SATA 3Gb/s ports, not 2 like NM10 (which doesn't do RAID either; I believe you need Windows for RAID 5 on Intel southbridges anyway). In addition to that it has two Intel 82574L Gigabit controllers - most boards have one, maybe two but Realtek, which in my experience (and many who have used both) Intel makes some of the best (speed and reliability) ethernet controllers. You also get PCI-E 2.0 x4 in an x16 slot for expansion, as well as one USB 2.0 port intended to for a flash drive to boot from; there's also a 4-pin molex to power fans or other low-power stuff and two 4-pin PWM fan headers.

The most important thing about it is it's integrated video chip (Matrox G200eW is nothing spectacular, VGA output and 8MB DDR - that's the amount of cache quad-core CPUs have) and IPMI with a dedicated Etherner port. This is for a really awesome feature this board is all about - remote management, you know, the thing you get with Dell's iDRAC cards. I won't get into detail about that, as Patrick @ ServeTheHome has written a lot about it (and about Supermicro in general), so just head there and read his post - it's extremely detailed.

This board is easily worth it's price, just like most Supermicro boards (on some boards the onboard components are worth more than a motherboard + those purchased separately, like X8ST3-F or X8SI6-F).

Does someone have power consumption figures without drives?
Because the NM10 D510 consumes a bit less than a AMD Neo I've got while this Supermicro seems to consume a bit more in spite of the slower CPU. And AMD deigned to allow us to use ECC with cheap gear. I don't have the nice NICs this Supermicro board has though.
Of course Intel currently owns the low power x86 space with the mobile Atoms (if you can live with their limitations). Hopefully AMD will give us parts for nice Ontario (low-power Bobcat) server boards next year. Will Supermicro put one together or will we have to rely on the likes of Zotac who may not bother with ECC support?

EDIT: I connected a couple of different D510 boards (Morex/Seasonic low-wattage power supply) on a UPS and it actually reports them as consuming significantly more at idle than my Neo (considering that the Neo box also powered 3.5'' drives, an active network link and a fan). Maybe that UPS isn't good at measuring small loads.